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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 

No. 97 

Editors : 

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 
PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LiTT.D., 

LL.D., F.B.A. 
PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. 



A complete ch r.sified list of the volumes of The 
Home University Library already published 
will be found at the back of this book. 



MILTON 



BY 

JOHN BAILEY 

AUTHOR OF "the CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY," " DR. JOHNSON AND 
HIS CIRCLE," ETC. 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 

ffir 



-T^3 



S«> 



^ 



my 29 ,g;5 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. 

I INTRODUCTORY .... 

II Milton's life and character . 

UI THE EARLIER POEMS . 

IV PARADISE LOST . . 

V PARADISE REGAINED AND SAMSON AGO- 
NISTES . . . . . 

BIBLIOGRAPHY .... 

INDEX . . 



7 

23 

89 

142 

196/ 

250 
254 



Milton ! thou shouldst be living at this hour : 

England hath need of thee : she is a fen 

Of stagnant waters : altar, sword and pen, 

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, 

Have forfeited their ancient English dower 

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men ; 

Oh ! raise us up, return to us again ; 

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. 

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart: 

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: 

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. 

So didst thou travel on life's common way, 

In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 

The lowliest duties on herself did lay. 

Wordsworth. 

O Mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies. 
O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity, 
God-gifted organ- voice of England, 
Milton, a name to resound for ages ; 
Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, 
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries. 
Tower, as the deep-doomed empyrean 
Rings to the roar of an angel onset — 
Me rather all that bowery loneliness, 
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring. 
And bloom profuse and cedar arches 
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean, 
Where some refulgent sunset of India 
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle, 
And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods 
Whisper in odorous heights of even. 

Tennyson. 



MILTON 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY 

When a man spends a day walking in 
hilly country he is often astonished at the 
new shape taken on by a mountain when it 
is looked at from a new point of view. Some- 
times the change is so great as to make it 
almost unrecognizable. He who has seen 
Snowdon from Capel-Curig is reluctant to 
admit that what he sees from Llanberis is 
the same mountain : he who has seen the 
Langdale Pikes from Glaramara is amazed 
at their beauty as he gazes at them from 
the garden at Low Wood. These are extreme 
cases. But to a less degree every traveller 
among the mountains is experiencing the 
same thing all day. He finds the eternal 
hills the most plastic of forms. At each 
change in his own position there is a change 
in the shape of a mountain under which he 
is passing. He may keep his eye fixed upon 
it but insensibly, as he watches, the long 
7 



8 MILTON 

chain will become a vertical peak, the jagged 
precipice a round green slope. 

Much the same process goes on as the 
generations of men pass on their way, with 
their eyes fixed, as they cannot help being, 
on the great human heights of their own and 
earlier days. Many of these look great only 
when you are close to them. At a little 
distance they are seen to be small and soon 
they disappear altogether. The true moun- 
tains remain but they do not keep the same 
shape. Each succeeding generation sees the 
peaks of humanity from a new point of view 
which cannot be exactly the same as that of 
its predecessor. Each age reshapes for itself 
its conception of art, of poetry, of religion, and 
of human life which includes them all. Of 
some of the masters in each of these worlds 
it feels that they belong not to their own 
generation only but to all time and so to 
itself. It cannot be satisfied, therefore, with 
what its predecessors have said about them. 
It needs to see them again freshly for itself, 
and put into words so far as it can its own 
attitude towards them. 

That is the excuse for the new books which 
will always be written every few years about 
Hebrew Religion, or Greek Art, or the French 
Revolution, or about such men as Plato, 



INTRODUCTORY 9 

St. Paul, Shakspeare, Napoleon. It is the 
excuse even for a much humbler thing, for 
the addition of a volume on Milton to the 
Home University Library. The object of 
this Library is not, indeed, to say anything 
startlingly new about the great men with 
whom it deals. Rather the contrary, in 
fact : for to say anything startlingly new 
about Shakspeare or Plato would probably 
be merely to say what is absurd or false. 
The main outlines of these great figures have 
long been settled, and the man who writes 
a book to prove that Shakspeare was not a 
great dramatist, or was an exact and lucid 
writer, is wasting his own time and that of 
his readers. The mountain may change its 
aspect from hour to hour, but when once we 
have ascertained that it is composed of 
granite, that matter is settled, and there is 
no use in arguing that it is sandstone or 
basalt. The object of such volumes as those 
of this Library is no vain assault on the 
secure judgment-seat of the world, no hope- 
less appeal against the recorded and accepted 
decrees of time. It is rather to re-state 
those decrees in modern language and from 
the point of view of our own day : to show, 
for instance, how Plato, though no longer for 
us what he was for the Neo-Platonists, is 

A2< 



10 MILTON 

still for us the most moving mind of the 
race that more than all others has moved 
the mind of the world; how Milton, though 
no longer for us a convincing justifier of the 
ways of God to men, is still a figure of tran- 
scendent interest, the most lion-hearted, the 
loftiest-souled, of Englishmen, the one con- 
summate artist our race has produced, the 
only English man of letters who in all that 
is known about him, his life, his character, 
his poetry, shows something for which the 
only fit word is sublime. 

There was much else beside, of course. 
The sublime is very near the terrible, and 
the terrible is often not very far removed 
from the hateful. Dante giving his " daily 
dreadful line " to the private and public 
enemies with whom he grimly populates his 
hell is not exactly an amiable or attractive 
figure. Still less so is Milton in those prose 
pamphlets in which he passes so rapidly, 
and to us so strangely, from the heights of 
heaven to the gutter mud of scurrilous person- 
alities. This is a disease from which our 
more amiable age seems at last to have 
delivered the world. But Milton has at 
least the excuse of a long and august tradition, 
from the days of Demosthenes, equally profuse 
of a patriotism as lofty and of personalities as 



INTRODUCTORY 11 

base as Milton's, to those of a whole line of 
the scholars of the Renaissance who lived 
with the noblest literature of the world and 
wrote of each other in the language of Billings- 
gate fishwives. So the sublimity of his life 
is wholly that of an irresistible will, set from 
the first on achieving great deeds and 
victoriously achieving them in defiance of 
adverse men and fates. But this is quite 
compatible with qualities the reverse of 
agreeable. It is the business of sublimity 
to compel amazed admiration, not to be a 
pleasant companion. Milton rejoicing over 
the tortures bishops will suffer in hell, Milton 
insulting Charles I, Milton playing the tyrant 
to his daughters, none of these are pleasant 
pictures. But such incidents, if perhaps 
unusually grim in the case of Milton, are 
apt to happen with Olympians. Experience 
shows that it is generally best to listen to 
their thunder from a certain distance. 

Such limitations must not be ignored. 
But neither must they be unduly pressed. 
The important thing about the sun is not its 
spots but its light and heat. No great poet 
in all history, with the possible exception of 
Dante, has so much heat as Milton. In prose 
and verse alike he burns and glows with fire. 
At its worst it is a fire of anger and pride, at 



12 MILTON 

its best a fire of faith in liberty, justice, 
righteousness, God. Of the highest of all 
fires, the white flame of love, it has indeed 
little. Milton had no Beatrice to teach him 
how to show men the loveliness of the divine 
law, the beauty of holiness. He could de- 
scribe the loss of Paradise and even its 
recovery, but its eternal bliss, the bliss of 
those who live in the presence of 

I'amor che move il sole e I'altre stelle, 

he could not describe. To do that required 
one who had seen the Vita Nuova before he 
saw the Inferno. In la sua volontade i nostra 
pace. So Dante thought : but not altogether 
so Milton. It is not a difference of theological 
opinion : it is a difference of temper. For 
Dante the " will of God " at once suggested 
both the apostolic and the apocalyptic love, 
joy, peace, the supreme and ultimate beatific 
vision. Bitter as his life on earth had been, 
no man ever suffering more from evil days and 
evil tongues, no man ever more bitterly con- 
scious of living in an evil and perverse genera- 
tion, he had yet within him a perpetual 
fountain of peace in the thought of God's 
will, and the faith that he was daily advancing 
nearer to the light of heaven and the divine 
presence. Milton, a sincere believer in God 



INTRODUCTORY 13 

if man ever were, must also at times have 
had his moments of beatific vision in which 
the invisible peace of God became more real 
than the storms of earthly life and the vile- 
ness of men. Indeed, we see the traces of 
such moments in the opening of ComuSy in 
the concluding lines of Lycidas, in the sus- 
tained ecstasy of At a Solemn Music. But 
they appear to have been only moments. 
Milton was a lifelong Crusader who scarcely 
set foot in the Holy Land. The will of God 
meant for him not so much peace as war. 
He is a prophet rather than a psalmist. 
" Woe is me, my Mother, that thou hast born 
me a man of strife and contention," he 
himself complains in the Reason of Church 
Government He was not much over thirty 
when he wrote those words : and they re- 
mained true of him to the end. For twenty 
years the strife was active and public; ever, 
in appearance at least, more and more suc- 
cessful : then for the final fourteen it became 
the impotent wrath of a caged and wounded 
lion. Never for a moment did his soul bow 
to the triumph of the idolaters : but neither 
could it forget them, nor make any permanent 
escape into purer air. Paradise Lost, Paradise 
Regained and Samson, especially the last, are 
all plainly the works of a man conscious of 



14 MILTON 

having been defeated by a world which he 
could defy but could not forget. Sublimely 
certain of the righteousness of his cause, he 
has no abiding certainty of its victory. He 
hears too plainly the insulting voices of the 
sons of Belial, and broods in proud and angry 
gloom over the ruin of all his hopes, personal, 
political and ecclesiastical. And as his re- 
ligion was a thing of intellect and conscience, 
not a thing of spiritual vision, he cannot make 
for himself that mystical trans-valuation of 
all earthly doings in the light of which the 
struggles of political and ecclesiastical parties 
are seen as things temporary, trivial and of 
little account. 

Such are the limitations of Milton. They 
are those of a man who lived in the time of a 
great national struggle, deliberately chose his 
own side in it, and from thenceforth saw 
nothing in the other but folly, obstinacy and 
crime. He has in him nothing whatever of 
the universal, and universally sympathetic, 
insight of Shakspeare. And he has paid the 
price of his narrowness in the open dislike, 
or at best grudging recognition, of that half 
of the world which is not Puritan and not 
Republican, and still looks upon history, 
custom, law and loyalty with very different 
eyes from his. But those who exact that 



INTRODUCTORY 15 

penalty do themselves at least as much 
injustice as they do Milton. To deprive 
ourselves of Milton because we are neither 
Puritan moralists nor Old Testament poli- 
ticians is an act of intellectual suicide. The 
wise, as the world goes on, may differ more 
and more from some of Milton's opinions. 
They can never escape the greatness either of 
the poet or of the man. Men's appreciation 
of Milton is almost in proportion to their in- 
stinctive understanding of what greatness is. 
Other poets, perhaps, have things of greater 
beauty : none in English, none, perhaps, in 
any language, fills us with a more exalting 
conviction of the greatness of human life. 
No man rises from an hour with Milton with- 
out feeling ashamed of the triviality of his 
life and certain that he can, if he will, make 
it less trivial. It is impossible not to catch 
from him some sense of the high issues, 
immediate and eternal, on which human 
existence ought to be conscious that it hangs. 
The world will be very old before we can 
spare a man who can render us this service. 
We have no one in England who renders it so 
imperiously as Milton. 

This part of his permanent claim upon our 
attention belongs to all that we know of him, 
to everything in his life so far as it is recorded, 



16 MILTON 

even to his prose, where its appearances are 
occasional, as well as to his verse, where it is 
continuous and omnipresent. It is, of course, 
in connection with the last that we are most 
conscious of it and that it is most important. 
After all, the rest would have been unknown 
or forgotten if he had not been a great poet. 
But it is not merely by his force of mind and 
character, nor merely by the influence they 
have upon us through the poetry, that he 
claims our attention to-day. Altogether in- 
dependently of that, the study of Milton is 
of immense and special value to Englishmen. 
Except in poetry our English contribution to 
the life of the arts in Europe has been com- 
paratively small. That very Puritanism which 
had so much to do with the greatness of 
Milton has also had much to do with the 
general failure of Englishmen to produce 
fine art, or even to care about it, or so much 
as recognize it when they see it. Now Milton, 
Puritan as he was, was always, and not least 
in his final Puritan phase, a supreme artist. 
Poetry has been by far our greatest artistic 
achievement and he is by far our greatest 
poetic artist. No artist in any other field, 
no Inigo Jones or Wren, no Purcell, no 
Reynolds or Turner, holds such unquestioned 
eminence in any other art as he in his. If 



INTRODUCTORY 17 

the world asks us where to look for the genius 
of England, so far as it has ever been ex- 
pressed on paper, we point, of course, un- 
hesitatingly to Shakspeare. But Shakspeare 
is as inferior to Milton in art as he is superior 
in genius. His genius will often, indeed, 
supply the place of art ; but the possession of 
powers that are above art is not the same 
thing as being continuously and consciously 
a great artist. We can all think of many 
places in his works where for hundreds of 
lines the most censorious criticism can scarcely 
wish a word changed; but we can also think 
of many in which the least watchful cannot 
fail to wish much changed and much omitted. 
" Would he had blotted a thousand " is still 
a true saying, and its truth known and felt 
by all but the blindest of the idolaters of 
Shakspeare. No one has ever uttered such 
a wish about the poetry of Milton. This is 
not the place to anticipate a discussion of 
it which must come later. But, in an intro- 
ductory chapter which aims at insisting upon 
the present and permanent importance of 
Milton, it is in place to point out the immense 
value to the English race of acquaintance 
with work so conscientiously perfect as 
Milton's. English writers on the whole have 
had a tendency to be rather slipshod in 



18 MILTON 

expression and rather indifferent to the finer 
harmonies of human speech, whether as a 
thing of pure sound or as a thing of sounds 
which have more than mere meaning, which 
have associations. Milton as both a lover of 
music and a scholar is never for a moment 
unconscious of either. It would scarcely be 
going too far to say that there is not a word 
in his verse which owes its place solely to the 
fact that it expresses his meaning. All the 
words accepted by his instinctive or deliberate 
choice were accepted because they provided 
him with the most he could obtain of three 
qualities which he desired : the exact expres- 
sion of the meaning needed for the immediate 
purpose in hand, the associations fittest to 
enhance or enrich that meaning, the rhythmical 
or musical effect required for the verse. The 
study of his verse is one that never exhausts 
itself, so that the appreciation of it has been 
called the last reward of consummate scholar- 
ship. But the phrase does Milton some in- 
justice. It is true that the scholar tastes 
again and again in Milton some flavour of 
association or suggestion which is not to be 
perceived by those who are not scholars, and 
it is also true that he consciously understands 
what he is enjoying more than they possibly 
can. But neither Milton's nor any other 



INTRODUCTORY 19 

great art makes its main appeal to learning. 
What does that is not art at all but pedantry. 
Those who have never read a line of the Greek 
and Latin poets certainly miss many pleasures 
in reading Milton, but, if they have any ear for 
poetry at all, they do not miss either the mind 
or the art of Milton. The unconquerable will, 
the high soaring soul, are everywhere audibly 
present : and so, even to those who have little 
reading and no knowledge at all of matters 
of rhythm or metre, are the grave Dorian 
music, the stately verses rolling in each after 
the other like great ocean waves in eternal 
difference, in eternal sameness. The ignorant 
ear hears and rejoices, with a delight that 
passes understanding, as the ignorant eye sees 
a fine drawing or a piece of Greek sculpture 
and without understanding enjoys, learns, and 
unconsciously grows in keenness of sight. To 
live with Milton is necessarily to learn that 
the art of poetry is no triviality, no mere 
amusement, but a high and grave thing, a 
thing of the choicest discipline of phrase, the 
finest craftsmanship of structure, the most 
nobly ordered music of sound. The ordinary 
reader may not be conscious of any such 
lessons : but he learns them nevertheless. 
And from no one else in English can he learn 
them so well as from Milton. 



20 MILTON 

For these reasons, these and others, we 
must ding to our great epic poet, Shelley's 
" third among the sons of light." He is not 
easy reading : the gTeatest seldom are : but 
as with all the greatest, each new reading is 
not only easier than the last but fuller of 
matter for thought, wonder and delight. At 
each new reading, too, the things in him that 
belonged to his own age, the Biblical literalism, 
the theological prepossessions, the political 
partisanship, recede more and more into the 
background and leave us freer to enjoy the 
things which belong to all time. And to all 
peoples. Milton is, indeed, intensely English 
and could not have been anything but an 
Englishman. His profound conviction of the 
greatness of moral issues, and his passionate 
love of liberty, have both been characteristic 
of the Englishmen of whom England is most 
proud. Till lately too, at any rate, we should 
have said that his fierce individualism, intel- 
lectual and political, was English too. But his 
mind and soul, stored with the gathered riches 
of many languages and of an inward experi- 
ence far too intense to be confined by national 
limitations, reach out to a world wider 
altogether than this island, wider even than 
Europe. In Samson Agonistes it is hard to 
say who is more vividly present, the English 



INTRODUCTORY 21 

politician, the Greek tragedian, or the Hebrew 
prophet. And in one sense Paradise Lost is 
the most universal of all poems. Indeed, that 
word may be applied to it in iljs strictest 
meaning, for the field of Milton's action is 
not Greece, or Italy, or England, or even the 
whole earth; it is the universe itself. That 
is one of its difficulties : but it is also a 
source of the uplifting and enlarging quality 
which is peculiarly Miltonic. With him we 
are conscious of treading no petty scene. We 
have in some respects travelled far from 
Milton's way both of stating and of solving 
his problem, but nevertheless it is still with 
us to-day and always : the problem of man's 
origin and destiny, of the ways of God to 
men. And though Milton is more hampered 
by literal belief in a particular theological 
legend than the authors of the Book of Job 
and the Prometheus Vinctus, yet, like these, he 
shows that a great mind and soul will leave 
the imprint of power and truth on the most 
incredible primitive story. To read his great 
poem, or indeed any of his poems, is to live 
for a while in the presence of one of those 
royal souls, those natural kings of men, whom 
Plato felt to be born to rule and inspire their 
fellows : and the heroic temper of the man is 
in England less rare than the consummate 



22 MILTON 

perfection of art which has eternahzed its 
utterance. This is Milton : and, though we 
may be too weak to read him often, we 
shall never be able to do without him, never 
think of him without an added strength and 
exaltation of spirit. 



CHAPTER II 

milton's life and character 

We know far more about Milton than about 
any other EngUsh poet born so long ago. 
There are three reasons for this. One is that 
from his earliest years he was very much 
interested in himself, was quite aware that 
he was a man above the stature of ordinary 
men, and had the most deliberate intention 
and expectation of doing great things. Con- 
sequently he is not only, like most good poets, 
fond of bringing more or less concealed auto- 
biography into his poetry, but still more in 
his prose works he inclines often to insert 
long passages about himself, his studies, 
travels, projects, friends and character. It 
is these more than anything else which now 
keep those works alive : and, coming from a 
man so proudly truthful as Milton evidently 
was, they are of the greatest interest and 
value. The second reason why we know so 
much about him is that he played an active 
part in politicy'a far more certain way of 
* 23 



24 MILTON 

attracting contemporary attention in England 
than writing Hamlet or building St. Paul's 
Cathedral. And the third is that his life 
has been made the subject of perhaps the 
most'minute and elaborate biography in the 
language./ Mr. Masson's labours enable us 
to know, if we choose, every fact, however 
insignificant, which the most laborious in- 
vestigation can discover, not only about 
Milton himself but, one may almost say, about 
everybody who was ever for five minutes in 
Milton's company. 

From this mass of material, all that can be 
touched here is a few of the most salient facts 
of the life and the most striking features of 
the character. 

Milton's life is naturally divided into three 
periods. The first is that of his education 
and early poems. It extends from his birth 
in 1608 to his return from his foreign travels 
in 1639. The second is that of his political 
activity, and extends from 1639 to the Restora- 
tion. The third is that of Paradise Lost, 
Paradise Regained and Samson, It concludes 
with his death, on November 8, 1674. 

Milton was born on December 9, 1608, at 
a house in Bread Street, Cheapside. The 
house is gone, but the street is a very short 
one, and it is still pleasant to step out of the 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 25 

roar of Cheapside into its quietness, and think 
that there, on the left, close by, under the 
shadow of Bow Church, was born the greatest 
poet to whom the greatest city of the modern 
world has given birth. London ought to 
hold fast to the honour of Milton, for his 
honour is peculiarly hers. He was not only 
born a Londoner but lived in London nearly 
all his life. And his mind is throughout that 
of the citizen. Neither agriculture nor sport 
means much to him; and, much as he loves 
the sights and sounds of the open country, 
his allusions to them are those of the delighted 
but still wondering alien, not those of the 
native. None is more often quoted than the 
passage in the ninth book of Paradise Lost — 

" As one who, long in populous city pent. 
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the 

air, 
Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to 

breathe 
Among the pleasant villages and farms 
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives 

delight — 
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine, 
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound — 
If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin 

pass. 
What pleasing seemed for her now pleases 

more. 
She most, and in her look sums all delight." 



26 MILTON 

And the secret of its charm obviously lies 
partly in the note of a personal experience. 
Just in that way must Milton, as boy and man, 
have often issued forth from the weariness of 
his studies and the noise and confinement of the 
streets, for a walk among the open fields that 
then lay so close at hand for the Londoner. 
And perhaps, as the inhabitants of towns often 
do, he took a pleasure in the very hedgerows 
unknown to those who saw them every day. 
The present Poet Laureate, who has spent most 
of his life in the country, has asked a question 
to which it is not easy for the countryman 
to give the answer he would like — 

" Whose spirit leaps more high, 
Plucking the pale primrose, 
Than his whose feet must fly 
The pasture where it grows ? " 

If the town-dweller never attains to that 
mystical communion with the secret soul of 
Nature which Wordsworth and such as 
Wordsworth owe to a life spent in the " tem- 
ple's inmost shrine," yet his eye, undulled by 
familiarity, commonly sees more in trees and 
flowers than the eyes of nearly all those who 
Ave every day among them. At its highest 
familiarity breeds intimacy, but more often 
what it breeds is indifference. A man who 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 27 

reads the Bible for the first time in middle 
life will never live inside it as some saints 
have lived; but he will see much that is 
hidden from most of those who have been 
reading it every day since they could read 
at all. 

Milton remained in London, so far as we 
know, for the first sixteen years of his life. 
He was educated at St. Paul's School by a 
private tutor, one Thomas Young, who was 
later a conspicuous Presbyterian figure, and 
by his father, to whom he owed far more 
than to any one except himself. The elder 
John Milton was a remarkable man. He had, 
to begin with, deserted the religious views of 
his family and taken a line of his own, a 
course which may not always indicate wisdom, 
but always indicates force of character. The 
poet's grandfather, who lived in the Oxford 
country, had adhered very definitely to Roman 
Catholicism and is said to have cast off his 
son for becoming a Protestant and something 
of a Puritan. The son went to London, set 
up in business as a scrivener, that is, as some- 
thing like a modern solicitor, and prospered 
so much that by 1632 he was able to retire 
and live in the country. He had considerable 
musical talents, and his compositions are 
found in collections of tunes to which such 



28 MILTON 

men as Morley, Dowland and Orlando Gibbons 
contributed. His house was no doubt full of 
music, as were, indeed, many others in that 
most musical of English centuries, and it 
must have been primarily to him that the 
poet owed the intense delight in music which 
appears in all his works. No poet speaks of 
music so often, and none in his poetry so often 
suggests that art. The untaught music of 
lark or nightingale he has not; but no poet 
has so much of the music which is one of the 
most consciously elaborate of those arts by 
which man expresses at once his senses, his 
mind and his soul. 

In the spring of 1625, just a month or two 
after the accession of the king whose tragical 
fate was to be the original source of Milton's 
European fame and very nearly the cause 
of his mounting a scaffold himself, the future 
author of Paradise Lost went into residence 
at Cambridge where he remained for seven 
years. The college that can boast his name 
among its members is Christ's. Unlike so 
many poets he had a successful university 
career, took the ordinary degrees, and 
evidently made an impression on his con- 
temporaries. No doubt the strong natural 
bias to a studious life which he had from a 
child made him apter for university discipline 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 29 

than is usually the case with genius. From 
the beginning he had the passion of the 
student. He says of himself that from his 
twelfth year he scarce ever went to bed before 
midnight; and Aubrey reports much the 
same and says that his father " ordered the 
maid to sit up for him." And his studies were 
in the main the accepted studies of the time, 
not, like Shelley's, a defiance of them. All 
through his life he had a scholar's respect 
for learning, and for the great tradition of 
literature which it is the true business of 
scholarship to maintain. Radical and rebel 
as he was in politics and theology, contemp- 
tuous of law, custom and precedent, he was 
always the exact opposite in his art. There 
he never attempted the method of the tabula 
rasa, or clean slate, which made his political 
pamphlets so barren. The greatest of all 
proofs of the strength of his individuality is 
that it so entirely dominates the vast store 
of learning and association with which his 
poetry is loaded. Such a man will at least 
give his university a chance; and, though 
Milton did not in later life look back on Cam- 
bridge with great affection or respect, there 
can be no doubt that the seven years he spent 
within the walls of a college were far from 
useless to the poet who more than any other 



30 MILTON 

was to make learning serve the purposes of 
poetry. 

So strong, self-reliant and proudly virtuous 
a nature was not likely to be altogether 
popular either with the authorities or with 
his companions. Nor was he, at any rate at 
first. He had some difference with his tutor, 
had to leave Cambridge for a time, and is 
alleged, on very doubtful evidence, to have 
been flogged. But, whatever his fault was, 
it was nothing that he was ashamed of, for 
he publicly alluded to the affair in his Latin 
poems, and was never afraid to challenge 
inquiry into his Cambridge career. Nor did 
it injure him permanently with the authorities. 
He took his degrees at the earliest possible 
dates, and ten years after he left Cambridge 
was able to write publicly and gratefully of 
" the more than ordinary respect which I 
found, above many of my equals, at the hands 
of those courteous and learned men, the 
Fellows of that college wherein I spent some 
years : who, at my parting after I had taken 
two degrees, as the manner is, signified many 
ways how much better it would content them 
that I would stay : as by many letters full of 
kindness and loving respect, both before that 
time and long after, I was assured of their 
singular good affection towards me." The 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 31 

Fellows were no doubt clerical dons of the 
ordinary sort : indeed, we know they were ; 
but they could not have Milton among them 
for seven years without discovering that he 
was something above the ordinary under- 
graduate. Wood, who died in 1695 and 
therefore writes as a contemporary, says of 
Milton that while at Cambridge he was 
" esteemed to be a virtuous and sober person 
yet not to be ignorant of his own parts." 
Such young men may not be popular, but 
if they have the real thing in them they 
soon compel respect. By the undergraduates 
Milton was called "The Lady of Christ's." 
And it is plain, from his own references to 
this nickname in a Prolusion delivered in the 
college, that he owed it not only to his fair 
complexion, short stature and great personal 
beauty, but also to the purity, delicacy and 
refinement of his manners. He contemptu- 
ously asks the audience who had given him 
the nickname whether the name of manhood 
was to be confined to those who could drain 
great tankards of ale or to peasants whose 
hands were hard with holding the plough. 
He disdains the implied charge of prudery, 
and indeed his language is what could not have 
been used by an effeminate or a coward. No 
braver man ever held a pen. Wood says 



32 MILTON 

that " his deportment was affable, his gait 
erect, bespeaking courage and undaunted- 
ness," and he himself tells us that " he did 
not neglect daily practice with his sword," 
and that " when armed with it, as he generally 
was, he was in the habit of thinking himself 
quite a match for any one and of being per- 
fectly at ease as to any injury that any one 
could offer him." Evidently he owed his 
title of " Lady " to no weakness, but to a 
disgust at the coarse and barbarous amuse- 
ments then common at the universities. He 
says of himself that he had no faculty for 
" festivities and jests," as indeed was to be 
witnessed by all his writings. The witticisms, 
if such they can be called, which occur in his 
poetry and oftener in his prose are akin to 
what are now called practical jokes, that is 
jokes made by the bodies of those whose 
minds are not capable of joking. This was 
partly the common fault of an age whose 
jests, as may be seen sometimes even in 
Shakspeare, appear to us to alternate be- 
tween the merely obvious, the merely verbal, 
and the merely barbarous ; but it was partly 
also the peculiar temperament of Milton, whose 
sense of humour, like that of many learned 
and serious men, was so sluggish that it could 
only be moved by a very violent stimulus. 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 33 

But in the main with Milton there was no 
question of jests, good or bad. It is evident 
from his own proud confessions that he was 
always intensely serious, at least from his 
Cambridge days, always conscious of the 
greatness of life's issues, always uplifted with 
the noblest sort of ambition. He says of 
himself that, however he might admire the 
art of Ovid and poets of Ovid's sort, he soon 
learnt to dislike their morals and turned from 
them to the " sublime and pure thoughts " of 
Petrarch and Dante. And his " reasonings, 
together with a certain nioeness of nature, an 
honest haughtiness, and self-esteem either of 
what I was or what I might be (which let 
envy call pride) . . . kept me still above 
those low descents of mind beneath which he 
must deject and plunge himself that, can agree 
to saleable and unlawful prostitutions." And 
in repudiating an impudently false charge 
against his own character he boldly announces 
a doctrine far above his own age, one, indeed, 
to which ours has not yet attained. " Having 
had the doctrine of Holy Scripture unfolding 
these chaste and high mysteries with timeliest 
care infused that ' the body is for the Lord 
and the Lord for the body,' thus also I argued 
to myself, — that, if unchastity in a woman, 
whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be 



34 MILTON 

such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly 
in a man, who is both the image and glory 
of God, it must, though commonly not so 
thought, be much more deflowering and dis- 
honourable. . . . Thus large I have purposely 
been that, if I have been justly taxed with 
this crime, it may come upon me after all this 
my confession with a tenfold shame." 

Such was the man from the first, severe 
with others and with himself, conscious, 
almost from boyhood, in his own famous 
words, that^ " he who would not be frustrate 
of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable 
things ought himself to be a true poem " ; a 
somewhat strange figure, no doubt, among the 
tavern-haunting undergraduates of the seven- 
teenth century, a stranger still to be honoured, 
a hundred and fifty years later, in the rooms 
which then and now were remembered as his, 
by the single act of drunkenness in the long 
and virtuous life of Wordsworth. When he 
left the university in 1632 Milton had con- 
quered respect, though probably not popu- 
larity. The tone of the sixth of the academic 
Orations, which he delivered at Cambridge 
and allowed to be published in his old age, 
shows that, being still aware that he was not 
popular, he was surprised and pleased at the 
applause with which a previous discourse of 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 35 

his had been received and at the large gather- 
ing which had crowded to hear the one he 
was dehvering. He says that " nearly the 
whole flower of the university " was present ; 
and, after allowing for compliments, it is plain 
that only a man whose name aroused expecta- 
tions could draw an audience which could be 
so described without obvious absurdity. 

We may well then believe that there is no 
great exaggeration in his nephew's statement, 
substantially confirmed as it is by other 
evidence, that when Milton left Cambridge 
in 1632 he was already " loved and admired 
by the whole university, particularly by the 
Fellows and most ingenious persons of his 
House." He had, as Wood says, " performed 
the collegiate and academical exercises to the 
admiration of all." The power of his mind, 
the grave strength of his character, could not 
but be plain to all who had come into close 
contact with him, and even for those who 
had not he was a man who had distinction 
plainly written on his face. It is possible, 
even, that he was already known as a poet. 
Before he left Cambridge he had written 
several of the poems which we still read in 
his works : the beautiful stanzas On the Death 
of a Fair Infant, so like and so unlike the 
early poems of Shakspeare, the noble Ode 



36 MILTON 

on the Nativity begun probably on Christmas 
Day 1629, though this is not certain; the 
pretty httle Song on May Morning which 
one hkes to fancy having been sung at some 
such Cambridge greeting of the rising May 
Day sun as those which are still performed 
on Magdalen Tower at Oxford; certainly 
the remarkable lines which are his tribute 
to Shakspeare : certainly also the beautiful 
Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester ; 
and, to mention no more, the autobiographical 
sonnet on attaining the age of twenty-three. 
None of these except the lines on Shakspeare 
are known to have been published before 
they appeared in the volume of Milton's poems 
issued in 1645. But the fact that those lines 
were printed, though without Milton's name, 
among the commendatory verses prefixed to 
the 1632 Folio Edition of Shakspeare, may 
imply that Milton was already known as a 
young poet. There is also a story that the 
poem on the death of Lady Winchester was 
printed in a contemporary Cambridge collec- 
tion. But whether this were so or not (and no 
such volume is known to have existed), it seems 
almost certain that some of Milton's poems 
would have got known by being passed about 
in manuscript copies. He himself from the 
first undervalued nothing he wrote, and was 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 37 

not afraid to say publicly, in his Reason of 
Church Government, that, from his early youth, 
it had been found that, " whether aught was 
imposed me by them that had the overlooking, 
or betaken to of mine own choice in English 
or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly 
this latter, the style, by certain signs it had, 
was likely to live." He published these bold 
words in 1641, when he had given no public 
proof at all of their truth. Such a man was 
not likely to be unwilling that his verses 
should be seen : and in particular such poems 
as the epitaph on Lady Winchester, whose 
death aroused much public interest, or the 
Ode on the Nativity, plainly challenging the 
greatest of his predecessors by its high theme 
and noble art, are almost sure to have got 
about and won him some fame. 

He had earned distinction, then, and aroused 
expectation before the end of his university 
career. But what surprised his contem- 
poraries was that for the next seven or eight 
years he appeared to do little or nothing to 
justify the one or fulfil the other. Leaving 
Cambridge when he was twenty-three, he 
entered no profession, but lived till he was 
past twenty-nine in studious retirement at 
his father's country house at Horton near 
Windsor. His father, and other friends, very 



38 MILTON 

naturally remonstrated at this apparent in- 
activity. To them all the answer is the same. 
He cannot now enter the Church, as he had 
intended, because he would not " subscribe 
slave " and take oaths that he could not keep. 
He is not surrendering himself to " the endless 
delight of speculation," or to the pleasure 
of " dreaming away his years in the arms 
of studious retirement." No; he has other 
things in view than these : but for their per- 
formance he demands time for himself and 
patience from his friends : his own thought 
is not of being early or late but of being fit. 
And the work for which he is preparing is in 
his own mind a settled thing. It is literature, 
poetry, and, in particular, as will soon appear 
more definitely, a great poem to take its 
place among the great poems of the world. 

The writing of poetry has never been a 
recognized and seldom a lucrative profession. 
Most poets, like other artists, have had to face 
family opposition and the danger of poverty 
in obeying their inward call. In this matter 
Milton is one of the great exceptions. Many 
poets have had fathers as rich as his, but it 
would not be easy to find one who resigned 
himself so cheerfully to the prospect of having 
a poetic son. The elder Milton was, however, 
as we have seen, no ordinary man. His sense 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 39 

of the value of the things of the mind was 
almost as great as his faith in his son and far 
greater than his ambition for his son's visible 
success in the eyes of the world. He had 
naturally hoped that that son's evident 
abilities would be exhibited in the ordinary 
course in a recognized profession; and he 
evidently made some protest against the 
apparently objectless studies which, even 
after leaving Cambridge, Milton seemed to 
regard as his sole business in life. The record 
of this survives in the Latin poem Ad Pair em 
which is plainly a reply to some such remon- 
strance. It is an appeal, and one of very 
confident tone, to his father not to scorn the 
Muses to whom he himself owes his own great 
musical gifts. Why should he, a musician, be 
astonished to find that his son is a poet? 
Poetry more than any of man's other gifts is 
the proof of his divine origin : music and 
poetry rank together ; may it not be that he 
and his father have divided between them the 
two great gifts of Apollo ? 

" Dividuumque Deum genitorque puerque 
tenemus." 

The poem rings with the scorn of wealth, 
from which one must suppose that the old 
man of business had pointed out that the 



40 MILTON 

scholar's life was not usually lived under the 
smiles of Fortune. How can you, of all men, 
replies his son, ask me to care much for that ? 
You trained me from the first for learning, not 
for the City or the Bar ; the father who had 
his son taught not only Latin, but Greek and 
Hebrew, French and Italian, astronomy and 
physical science, cannot ask him to regard 
money making as the object of life. I have 
chosen a better part than that : and you were 
the inspirer of my choice. And I know that 
at heart you agree with it and share it. 

The poem is one of the most interesting 
of Milton's Latin poems, being rather less 
affected than most of them by that artificiality 
of classical allusion which is the bane of such 
productions. So far as we know, it was the 
last word on its subject. From henceforth 
no one questioned Milton's right to be a poet 
and himself. If he ever afterwards deserted 
his poetic vocation it was at what he believed 
to be a still higher call. For the present he 
lived on quietly at Horton, near the Church 
where his mother's grave may still be seen; 
walking often, as we may suppose, about that 
quietly beautiful country washed by the 
Thames and crowned by Windsor Castle ; and 
sometimes, as we know from his own words, 
travelling the seventeen or eighteen miles to 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 41 

London to buy books or learn " anything new 
in Mathematics or in Music, in which sciences 

I then dehghted." Some of these visits to 
London evidently lasted days or weeks. 

The interesting thing about these six years 
at Horton is that they are the only part 
of his life during which the least rural of 
oiir poets lived continuously in the country. 
And perhaps we may say that they bore 
their natural fruit; for it was while he was 
at Horton that Milton wrote U Allegro and 

II Penseroso, in which he touched rural life 
and rural scenes with a freshness and direct- 
ness which he never again equalled. And 
the most important of the other poems 
written during these years, Arcades, Comus, 
and above all, Lycidas, show the same in- 
fluence. Arcades and Comus point also to 
the effect of his visits to London and the 
musical world : for both of these were written 
for the music of his friend Henry Lawes, 
and probably at his suggestion ; and, written 
as they were for entertainments given by 
members of the noble families of Stanley and 
Egerton, they show that Milton's plan of life 
did not involve cutting himself off from the 
great world, where they must have caused 
his name to be talked of. His life at Horton 
was evidently not that of a mere recluse, 

B2 



42 MILTON 

forgetting the world outside and forgotten by 
it. Arcades and Comus^ and still more the 
wonderful outburst At a Solemn Music, are 
visible links with the cultivated circles of the 
town, as Lycidas, which followed them in 
1637 and was printed in 1638 at Cambridge 
with other poems to the memory of Edward 
King, is a visible link with his old imiversity. 

The mention of the poems of these years, 
the most delightful that Milton was ever to 
write, show that the six years spent at 
Horton were not entirely what he calls them, 
*' a complete holiday spent in reading over 
the Greek and Latin writers." If he had 
never written another line, he had written 
enough by the time he left Horton to give 
him a place among the very greatest men 
who have practised the art of poetry in 
England. When he started abroad in 1638 
he must have known, and his father too, 
that his daring choice had already justified 
itself. " You ask what I am about, what I 
am thinking of," he writes to his friend 
Diodati at the end of the Horton time ; " why, 
with God's help, of immortality." It is the 
voice of a man who knows he has already 
done great things but counts them as nothing 
compared with what he is to do later on. 

Man proposes. In 1637 Milton was " plum- 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 43 

ing his wings " for the very mightiest of poetic 
flights, for such a poem as would give full 
scope to his genius and place him among the 
great poets of the world. But in the result 
he actually wrote less poetry in the next 
twenty years than he had written in the 
previous five : less in quantity and far less 
in quality and importance. The first inter- 
ruption was the completion of his elaborate 
education by a grand tour. His generous 
father, who was well-to-do rather than rich, 
had acquiesced in his not so far earning one 
penny for himself, and was now prepared to 
provide him with about a thousand pounds 
of our present money to enable him to go 
abroad for a year or two in comfortable 
style and with the attendance of a servant. 
Leaving England in the spring of 1638, he 
spent a few days in Paris, where he was 
civilly entertained by the famous Grotius, 
then Swedish Ambassador there, as well as 
by the English Ambassador, Lord Scuda- 
more, but soon moved south, entering Italy 
by Nice and Genoa and arriving at Florence 
in August or September. There he spent 
two months, and was enthusiastically re- 
ceived by the various academies or clubs 
of men of letters which then flourished in 
Florence, one of whose still existing minute 



44 MILTON 

books records that at its meeting on September 
the 16th a certain John Milton, an EngUshman, 
read to the members a Latin hexameter poem 
showing great learning. There also he paid 
his famous visit to Galileo, now old and blind, 
and still a sort of nominal prisoner of the 
Inquisition, for the sin, as Milton says in 
the Areopagitica, of " thinking in Astronomy 
otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican 
licensers thought." One may be sure that it 
was not merely the interest of the new theory 
about the motion of the earth which drew 
him back so often to that question in Paradise 
Lost The blind astronomer, whose scientific 
heresies had placed him in some danger of 
the thumbscrew, must have been a very near 
and moving memory to the blind poet whose 
political and ecclesiastical heresies had so 
nearly brought him to the gallows. 

From Florence Milton went on to Rome, 
where his scholarly tastes gratified them- 
selves for two months in the study of what 
remained of the ancient city. The famous 
picture of Rome in Paradise Regained may 
owe something to these weeks. There, too, 
he was well received by several of Rome's 
most distinguished scholars who paid him 
compliments of Italian extravagance. There, 
too, he heard the famous Leonora Baroni 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 45 

sing, and was so moved as to write three 
Latin epigrams in her praise. But it was at 
Naples, whither he passed on before winter, 
that he made the acquaintance which, except 
that of GaHleo, is the most interesting his 
Italian tour brought him. It was that of 
the Neopolitan patrician, Giovanni Manso, 
who had been intimate with Tasso and 
Marini and had been celebrated by Tasso in 
the Gerusalemme Conquistata. His courtesy 
to a foreigner was soon to procure him a still 
greater honour; for before leaving Naples 
Milton addressed to him a Latin poem thank- 
ing him for his kindness, speaking openly of 
his own poetic ambitions and praying that, if 
he lives to write the great Arthurian Epic 
which he was then planning, he may find 
such a friend as Tasso found to welcome his 
poem, comfort his old age and cherish his 
fame. The only difficulty which separated 
Manso and Milton was that of religion, where 
Milton's unguarded frankness embarrassed 
his host. So, when he abandoned his in- 
tended tour in Greece because he thought it 
" base " to be " travelling abroad at ease for 
intellectual culture while his fellow-country- 
men were fighting at home for liberty,*' he 
was warned that the Jesuits at Rome had 
their eyes on him. But he stayed there two 



46 MILTON 

months nevertheless, fearlessly keeping his 
resolution, not indeed to introduce or invite 
religious controversy but, if questioned, then, 
as he says, " whatsoever I should suffer to 
dissemble nothing.*^ By February he was 
again in Florence ; and after visits to Bologna, 
Ferrara and Venice, whence he characteristic- 
ally shipped " a chest or two of choice music 
books " for England, he crossed the Alps, 
spent a week or two at Geneva and in France, 
and was at home by August 1639. 

The elaborate education was now formally 
complete; and what ordinary men call 
practical life was at last to begin for Milton. 
Now for the first time he had an abode of 
his own, a lodging in St. Bride's, Fleet Street, 
and soon afterwards a house in Aldersgate 
Street where he settled with a young nephew 
whom he undertook to educate. But the real 
work which he had in view was that of a poet, 
not of a schoolmaster. The high expecta- 
tions which he knew he had excited among 
Italian men of letters had reinforced those of 
his English friends ; and he was now more 
than ever inclined to follow that " inward 
prompting which now grew daily upon me 
that by labour and intent study (which I 
take to be my portion in this life), joined with 
the strong propensity of nature, I might per- 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 47 

haps leave something so written to aftertimes 
as they should not willingly let it die." So, 
as his extant notes show, he was weighing a 
large number of subjects for the great poem, 
slowly settling on a Biblical one, and indeed 
on that of the Fall of Man, and perhaps 
writing some earliest lines of what we now 
know as Paradise Lost, 

But in November 1640 occurred an event 
which governed Milton's life for the next 
twenty years. The Long Parliament met, 
and, from that time forward till its final 
meeting in 1660 to dissolve itself and prepare 
the way for Charles II, politics were the 
dominant interest of Milton's mind. It is his 
age of prose; during it he wrote very little 
verse of any kind, and none of importance 
except the finer of his eighteen Sonnets which 
nearly all belong to these years. On the 
other hand, most of his prose works were 
written between 1640 and 1660. Of these it 
is enough to say that they are perhaps the 
most curious of all illustrations of the great 
things which a poet alone can bring to prose 
and of the dangers which he runs in bringing 
them. A poet of the stature of Milton is 
ready at all times to catch all kinds of fire, 
not only the fires of faith and zeal and en- 
thusiasm, but also, as a rule, those of a scorn 



48 MILTON 

that knows no limit and a hatred that knows 
no mercy. Such a man needs a strongly 
made vessel to control his boiling ardours. 
Prose is not such a vessel : and they too often 
overflow from it in extravagance and violence. 
Poetry in all its severer forms places a re- 
straint upon the poet irom which as the mood 
of art gains upon him he has no desire to 
escape. Law and limitation, willing obedience 
to the prescribed conditions, are of the very 
essence of art. And this is as true of the 
greatest of the arts as of any other. It is 
not merely that the poet accepts the bondage 
of rhymes, or stanzas, or numbered syllables, 
as the painter accepts those of a flat canvas 
and the sculptor those of bronze or marble; 
it is that they all alike submit to the mood 
of art which is always universal and eternal 
as well as individual and temporal and there- 
fore disdains such crudities of personal violence 
as are to be found everywhere in Milton's 
prose and nowhere in his poetry. 

But if a poet's prose has its inevitable dis- 
advantages it has also some great qualities 
which only a poet can supply. In 1640 
Milton plunged into a great struggle in which 
his attitude throughout was that of an angry 
and contemptuous partisan. And his pam- 
phlets exhibit all the distortion of facts, in- 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 49 

justice to opponents, and narrowness of view 
which are the inevitable if often unconscious 
vices of the man who writes in the interest 
of a party. But they also contain flights of 
noble eloquence, in which, as in the passage 
about the City of London in the Areopagitica, 
the soul of partisanship has undergone a 
fiery purification and emerges free of all its 
grosser elements, a pure essence of zeal and 
faith and spiritual vision. 

The first stage of the struggle was largely 
ecclesiastical, and Milton plunged into it with 
five pamphlets in 1641 and 1642, fiercely 
demanding the abolition of Episcopacy and 
the establishment of a Presbyterian system 
in England. Fortunately for himself, as he 
was soon to see, the views he advocated did 
not in the end prevail. For the next step he 
took in the way of pamphlet writing would 
assuredly have got him into difficulties with 
any possible kind of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, 
whether after the model of Laud or of Calvin. 
It grew out of the most important and dis- 
astrous event in the whole of his private life. 
In the spring of 1643 he went into Oxford- 
shire, from which county his father had 
originally , come, and, to the surprise of his 
friends, who knew nothing of his intention, 
returned a married man. His wife was one 



50 MILTON 

Mary Powell, the daughter of a Justice of the 
Peace at Forest Hill, near Oxford. The 
Powell family owed the Milton family five 
hundred pounds, which may have been the 
poet's introduction to them. If so, the 
marriage to which it led had the results that 
might be expected from such a beginning. 
The war had then already begun, the King 
was at Oxford and the Powells were Cavaliers ; 
so that when Mrs. Milton, who had been 
accompanied to London by her relations, was 
to be left alone with a husband of twice her 
age, and of severe tastes, she shrank from the 
prospect, got away on a visit to her family and 
did not return till 1645, by which time the 
King was ruined and with him the Powells. 

When Shelley deserted his wife he wrote 
to her asking her to come and live with him 
and the lady who had supplanted her. When 
Milton's wife deserted him he wrote a series 
of pamphlets advocating divorce at the will 
of the husband. Such are the extravagances 
of those whose eyes are so accustomed to a 
brighter light that when brought into that of 
common day they see nothing, and make 
mistakes which are justly ridiculous to the 
children of this world. It is an old story : 
Plato's philosopher in the cave, the saint in 
politics, the modern poet in the world of war^ 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 51 

commerce, or industry : the eye that sees 
heaven often blunders on earth. Milton's 
divorce pamphlets, like nearly all his con- 
troversial writings, have three fatal defects. 
They are utterly blind to the temper of those 
to whom they were addressed, to the reason- 
able arguments of opponents, and to the 
practical difficulties inherent in their pro- 
posals. He argues that, as the law gives 
relief to a man whose wife disappoints him of 
the physical end of marriage, it is an outrage 
that he should have none when deprived 
of the social and intellectual companionship 
which is its moral end. But he takes no note 
of the awkward fact that the dismissed wife 
is not and cannot be in the same position as 
she was before her marriage. Nor does he 
give the wife any corresponding rights to get 
rid of her husband. These, and a hundred 
other difficulties all too visible to duller eyes, 
he utterly ignores as he proceeds on his 
violent way of deliverance from what he calls 
" imaginary and scarecrow sins.'* Nothing 
is allowed to stand in his path. For in- 
stance, the awkward texts in the Bible, 
whose authority he accepts, are given new 
interpretations with which it is to be feared 
his temper had more to do than his know- 
ledge of the meaning of Greek words. But 



52 MILTON 

there is not a hint of his own case in all he 
says, and it is not desertion that he discusses 
but incompatibility of temper. Masson even 
sees reason to think that he began the first 
pamphlet before his wife left him, but when, 
no doubt, her unfitness to be his wife was 
only too evident. However all that may be, 
we can only think with wondering pity of 
those summer weeks of 1643 and of the two 
years which followed. Everything in Milton's 
life and writings shows him a man unusually 
susceptible to the attraction of women, one 
whose love was of that strongest sort which is 
built on a chastity born not of coldness but of 
purity and self-control. Such a man, in such 
a plight, with the added misery of knowing 
that he owed it to his own rash folly, may be 
pardoned for forgetting the true bearing of 
his own doctrine that laws are made for the 
*' common lump of men." Cases like his are 
the real tragedies, the tragedies of life so 
much more bitter than the more visible ones 
of death ; and no thinking or feeling man will 
lightly decide that they must remain un- 
relieved. But neither Milton nor any of his 
successors must look at the problem from 
his own point of view alone. Laws are 
made, and ought to be, as he himself says, 
for the " lump of men "; and the wisdom or 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 53 

unwisdom of facilities for divorce must be 
judged, not merely by the relief they afford 
in unhappy marriages, but also by the danger 
of disturbance they produce in the far more 
numerous marriages which, though experienc- 
ing their days of doubt or difficulty, are on the 
whole happy or at least not unhappy. Per- 
haps Milton himself might have hesitated if 
he could have foreseen the consequences of an 
application of his theories. Modern divorce 
laws have filled our newspapers with just 
that "clamouring debate of utterless things" 
which he dreaded and abhorred, while few will 
argue that they have increased the number 
of unions which answer to his conception of 
" the true intent of marriage." 

After all, Milton's own story illustrates the 
advantages of putting delays and difficulties 
in the way of divorce. According to his 
nephew he had planned to act upon his 
principles and marry " a very handsome and 
witty gentlewoman " ; but the lady had 
more regard than he to the world's opinion. 
And she did Milton a service by her reluctance. 
For the rumour of her, helped by their own 
misfortunes, brought the Powells to their 
senses ; and with the help of Milton's friends 
they managed the well-known scene at a room 
in St. Martin's the Grand, in which he was 



54 MILTON 

surprised by the sight of his wife on her knees 

before him. 

" Soon his heart relented 
Towards her, his Ufe so late, and sole delight. 
Now at his feet submissive in distress." 

So he glances back at the scene twenty- 
years later when he was drawing to the close 
of his great poem. Meanwhile he received 
back his wife, who bore him three daughters 
and died in 1653 or 1654. He was to marry 
again in 1656; but this second wife, the 
" espoused saint " of his sonnet, lived little 
more than a year; and in 1663 he married 
his third wife who long survived him. But to 
return to the house in the Barbican, to which 
he removed with his wife in 1645. With him 
there were also his father, two nephews and 
other boys whom it was his principal occupa- 
tion to teach. It is somewhat surprising that 
he found pupils, as his views on the divorce 
question had naturally caused scandal in all 
quarters and received little support in any. 
He could now see that the Presbyterian 
Church discipline which he had advocated so 
eagerly in his first pamphlets might have its 
inconveniences; the elders of an English 
kirk would be no more merciful than his 
detested bishops to such freedom of thought, 
speech and action as he now demanded. 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 55 

From henceforth he is an Independent and 
more than an Independent; for he was 
attached to no congregation, apparently 
attended no church regularly, and maintained 
that profoundly religious temper which is 
even more visible in his last works than in his 
first without the support of any authority, 
creed or companionship in prayer. With 
these views growing upon him it was natural 
that, when the struggle came between the 
Presbyterian Parliament and the Independent 
Army, he had no hesitation in supporting the 
Army; nor is it surprising that such a man 
of no compromise as he had shown himself 
to be was ready to come forward, even before 
the deed was done, with a defence of the 
execution of Charles I. It is in connection 
with that event that his name first became 
known to all Europe and was soon so famous 
that foreigners visiting England desired to 
see two men above all others, Oliver Cromwell 
and John Milton. This Milton, from hence- 
forth a European celebrity, was not the 
author of Paradise Lost which was not yet 
written, nor of his earlier poems which were 
little known in England and quite unknown 
elsewhere. He was the apologist of the 
Regicides, the Foreign Secretary of the 
world-famed Protector. 



56 MILTON 

For the next eleven years, from 1649 to 
1660, Milton had a public and official as well 
as a private life. Charles was executed on 
January 30, 1649. Within a few days after 
appeared Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magis- 
trates, largely written, of course, before the 
execution, and justifying it and all the other 
proceedings of the Army without any hesi- 
tation or compromise. It has some breath- 
ings of the Miltonic grandeur ; but that is all. 
For the rest it is a mere party polemic written 
for the moment; and, as is the case with all 
pamphlets, the very qualities which gave it 
its contemporary interest make it unreadable 
to posterity. Part of it is a sweeping asser- 
tion of the inalienable right of the whole 
people to choose, judge and depose their 
rulers; a democratic doctrine which a few 
years later, when England had grown tired 
of the Army and the Puritans, he was to find 
as inconvenient as he had already found his 
early advocacy of the Presbyterian system 
in matters ecclesiastical. For the moment, 
however, the pamphlet made him a person of 
importance. Such a man, learned, eloquent, 
of high character, of visible sincerity, of utter 
fearlessness, was not an ally to be despised 
by a Government which had outraged public 
opinion at home and abroad. Within a few 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 57 

weeks he was appointed Secretary for Foreign 
Tongues to the Council of State; and from 
henceforth till after the death of Cromwell 
he wrote the weightiest of the vindications, 
remonstrances and authoritative demands 
which the great Protector addressed to an 
astonished and overawed Europe. We can 
read them still. Many are insignificant, 
dealing with petty personal details; but the 
best, especially those that deal with the 
universal cause of Protestantism and freedom, 
rise on spiritual wings far above the language 
of diplomacy and officialism, letting us hear 
the authentic voice of Milton preluding the 
thunders of Cromwell and Blake. 

But the first important work required of 
Milton belonged rather to the man of letters 
than to the Foreign Secretary. The horror 
aroused both at home and abroad by the 
execution of Charles, already great enough 
in itself to be very inconvenient to the 
Government, was greatly increased by the 
publication of a book called Eikon Basilike 
which purported to be the work of the king 
himself and appeared immediately after his 
death. It is a kind of religious portrait of 
Charles, reporting his spiritual meditations 
and containing a justification of his life. Its 
success was prodigious ; fifty editions are said 



58 MILTON 

to have appeared within a year. It was 
obviously necessary that some reply should 
be attempted; and the task was naturally 
assigned to Milton, who published his Eikono- 
klastes, or Image -Breaker, in October. It is a 
mere pamphlet, even more violent than the 
Tenure of Kings, not ashamed to rake up such 
absurdities as the alleged poisoning of James I 
by Buckingham, with the usual Miltonic 
inconsistencies, such as that which denounces 
Charles for the crime of refusing his consent 
to bills passed by Parliament and forgets 
that the Government on whose behalf he is 
writing established itself by a forcible sup- 
pression of the Parliamentary majority. It 
survives now only by the curious passage in it 
which tells us that William Shakspeare was 
" the closet com^panion " of Charles I in the 
"solitudes" of the end of his life; and by 
the puritanical allusion to the " vain amatori- 
ous poem of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia^^ 
from which, however " full of worth and wit " 
in its own kind, it was a disgrace to the king 
to borrow a prayer at so grave an hour. 
Perhaps as a mark of their approval of Eikono- 
klastes, the Council of State gave Milton lodg- 
ings in Whitehall; and soon afterwards, in 
January 1650, called upon him to reply to 
another Royalist book which was making a 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 59 

great stir. The result was the beginning of 
a poHtical and personal controversy which 
lasted almost as long as it was safe for Milton 
to write about politics at all. 

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
great scholars had a position which they are 
never likely to occupy again. In those cosmo- 
politan days when an Italian governed France, 
and regiments and even armies were often 
commanded by foreigners, the honour of 
possessing a celebrated scholar was eagerly 
disputed not only by universities, but by 
cities, sovereign states, and even kings. 
Learning had then a market value in the 
world : for then, as always, especially since 
the invention of printing, European opinion 
was worth having on one's side; and in 
the days before journalism the practice was 
to hire distinguished scholars to write to a 
political brief. After the death of Charles I 
it was obviously the policy of Charles II to 
secure support by a powerful indictment of 
the iniquity of the rulers of the English 
Commonwealth. For this purpose his advisers 
obtained the services i}^ a certain Claude de 
Saumaise, or, as he ^^.^s generally called, 
Salmasius. This man, forgotten now except 
for Milton, was then a scholar of such fame 
that his presence was disputed between Oxford 



60 MILTON 

and Venice, the French and the Dutch, be- 
tween the Pope who wanted him at Rome 
and Christina of Sweden who was soon to 
persuade him to go to Stockholm. So it is 
not altogether surprising that Charles II was 
advised to pay him, and perhaps paid him, 
much more than he could afford for writing 
a book called Defensio Regia, which was to 
be before all Europe the public statement of 
the case against the new rulers of England. 
Milton spent a year in preparing his reply, 
which came out in the beginning of 1651. The 
Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio is now plea- 
santer reading for Milton's detractors than 
for those who honour his name. The un- 
bridled insults which it heaps upon Charles I 
and still more upon Salmasius, for whom its 
least offensive titles are such as " blockhead," 
" liar " and " apostate," exceed even the wide 
limits of abuse customary in these days. 
Corruptio optimi pessima : such a man as 
Milton, if he once descends to the bandying 
of foul language, will beat the very bargemen 
themselves. But wh -t astonished his con- 
temporaries was n^h his violence but his 
courage. An unkn^j;^^ Englishman had dared 
to meet the giant of learning on his own 
ground and had at least held his own. It 
may have been partly as the result of this 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 61 

that Salmasius no longer found Holland a 
pleasant place of residence and removed to 
Sweden. A more certain result is that the 
English David who had stood up to Goliath 
was from henceforth a European celebrity. 
With his usual proud courage he had put his 
own name on the title-page of his book, 
challenging to himself both the glories and 
the dangers that might come of it. He was 
not to be disappointed of either. 

From henceforth he was in the thick of a 
violent controversy, which made so much 
more noise than it deserved in its own day 
that it need make none here. Replies came 
out both to his Eikonoklastes and to his 
Defensio : new books grew out of the con- 
troversy; Milton's nephew wrote on his be- 
half, and anonymous friends of Salmasius on 
his ; the adversaries of Milton no more spared 
his character than he had spared theirs; a 
Defensio Secunda from his own hand seemed 
necessary, and appeared in 1654 ; and so with 
minor pamphlets and second editions we get 
on to the end of the weary controversy, in 
which for contemporaries there was perhaps 
some fire and light, but for us now little but 
smoke and darkness of confusion. 

Such was the work which was Milton's chief 
occupation during the Commonwealth, to the 



62 MILTON 

doing of which he deliberately sacrificed hik 
eyesight. Within a year after the publica- 
tion of his book against Salmasius its foreseen 
result was complete. From henceforth Milton 
was dependent upon the eyes of others. He 
was only forty-four when overtaken by this 
calamity. Yet his courage seems never to 
have failed him. " I argue not," he tells 
Cyriack Skinner in his sonnet — 

" Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a 
jot 
Of heart or hope, but still bear up and 
steer 
Right onward. What supports me, dost 
thou ask? 
The conscience, friend, to have lost them 

overplied 
In Liberty's defence, iny noble task. 
Of which all Europe rings from side to side." 

Whoever had begun to have doubts about 
the course taken in 1649 and since, he had 
none ; and no one had suffered more in defence 
of it. The other and greater sonnet on his 
blindness — 

" When I consider how my light is spent 

Ere half my days in this dark world and 
wide " 

shows him content if need be to take his 
place among those whose desire to serve 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 63 

God must find its peace in the thought 
that 

" They also serve who only stand and wait." 

In the same spirit, perhaps, is the motto 
which he appended to his signature in the 
album of a learned foreigner in 1651 : "I am 
made perfect in weakness." But nothing of 
weakness, not even its perfection, could ever 
come near Milton. He played a greater part 
in this world without his eyes than ever he 
had played with them. Without their help 
he did what prose could do towards justifying 
the ways of England to Europe, and was very 
soon to do what verse could do towards justify- 
ing the ways of God to men. He cannot, 
perhaps, be said to have succeeded in either, 
but one at least of the failures is a whole 
heaven above what ordinary men call success. 
A few words may be said of his attitude 
towards men and measures during this political 
period of his life. His unqualified and im- 
mediate support of the King's execution had, 
of course, united him with the Cromwellian 
party who had brought it about. And his 
anti-Presbyterian views carried him in the 
same direction. So we are not surprised to 
find that, when Cromwell got rid of the 
Parliament by military force and soon after- 



64 MILTON 

wards became Protector, Milton approved his 
action and gladly continued to serve under 
him. Nor was Milton the man to be dis- 
turbed by the Protector's rapid dissolution 
of his first Parliament, by the period of 
personal Government which followed, or by 
his angry breach with his second Parliament. 
Poets have seldom understood politics, and 
Milton, the most political of poets, perhaps 
less than any. No man ever had less of that 
sense of law and custom, of the need of con- 
tinuity, which is the very centre and secret 
of politics. Few great statesmen have been 
able to maintain perfect consistency ; but the 
least consistent have generally been aware 
that there was something in inconsistencies 
that needed explanation. Milton never shows 
any consciousness of the patent incongruity 
between his early exaltation of the indefeasible 
rights of Parliaments and his support of the 
Cromwellian attitude towards them : between 
his angry denunciation of Charles I for pre- 
suming to retain the ancient right of the 
kings to refuse their assent to Bills submitted 
to them and his approval of Cromwell's dis- 
missal of a Parliament for attempting to deny 
the same right to the Protector : between the 
extreme doctrine of free printing claimed in 
the Areopagitica and the fact that its author 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 65 

was afterwards concerned in licensing books 
under a Government which vigorously sup- 
pressed " seditious " publications. But in- 
consistencies by themselves are of little 
importance, particularly in revolutionary 
times; they would be of none, in Milton's 
case, if he had ever admitted that he had 
learnt from experience and consequently 
changed his mind. But he never did. Parlia- 
ments remained sacred when they were for 
pulling down bishops, profane when they were 
for establishing Presbyterianism, and utterly 
detestable when they were for restoring 
Charles II. The fact is, of course, that 
Milton, like most men of much imagination 
and no political experience, saw a vision of 
certain things in the value of which he be- 
lieved with all his soul, and saw none of the 
objections to them and none of the difficulties 
that stood in their way. At the very end, 
when the bonfires for Charles II were almost 
lighted in the streets, he could publish A 
Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free 
Commonwealth ; and the title he chose for 
that book was typical of his whole attitude 
in all practical matters. He had to an 
extreme degree the man of vision's blindness 
to the all -important fact that the mass of 
men would not have what he aims at if they 



66 MILTON 

could and could not if they would. At least 
in a free country the statesman knows that 
he has got to work through stupid people, 
with their consent, and with regard to the 
measure of their capacities. For such men 
as Milton stupid people either do not exist or 
are to be merely ignored. That is his attitude 
all through. Alike in the matter of divorce 
and in the matter of education, in the ecclesi- 
astical problem and in the political, he was 
always eager to put forward a "ready and 
easy way " which entirely ignored the nature 
of the human material which was to walk in it. 
He simply chose not to see that in all these 
matters men had for centuries been walking 
in a way which was not his, a way which 
had in fact by now diverged many miles 
from his ; and that they could not possibly, 
even if they would, transport themselves in a 
moment, at a mere wave of his wand, across 
the intervening bogs and forests which the 
lapse of years had rendered impassable. He 
never appears to have had a single glimpse 
of the truth that the essential business of 
the statesman is to be always moving from 
the past to the future without ever letting the 
bridge between them break down. The princi- 
pal food of a political people is custom, and to 
break the bridge is to cut off the only source 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 67 

of its supply. The greatest proof that Crom- 
well was really a statesman and not a mere 
political emergency man of unusual character 
and ability is that in his last years he was 
evidently seeing more and more plainly that 
the right metaphor for a statesman is taken 
from grafting and not from " root and 
branch " operations. It is clear that he had 
seen that political branches may be pruned 
away but roots can very seldom be safely 
disturbed; and that among the roots in 
English politics were a hereditary Monarchy 
and an established Church. Dynasty and 
formularies might perhaps be safely changed ; 
but the things themselves were of the root, 
and the tree would not flourish if they were 
touched. It is characteristic of Milton that 
in both these matters he was strongly opposed 
to the policy towards which Cromwell was 
feeling his way. Ten years had taught him 
nothing, and the death of Cromwell found 
him as blind to political possibilities as the 
death of Charles I. 

One would like to know something of the 
relations between the two greatest men of 
the Commonwealth. But there is little or 
nothing to know. It is plain that in most 
matters they must have been in close agree- 
ment ; and in a few, as in the business of the 



68 MILTON 

Piedmont massacres, the two great hearts 
must have beaten as one, while the sword 
of Cromwell stood ready drawn behind the 
trumpet of Milton's noble prose and nobler 
verse. The only surviving act of personal 
contact between them is to be found in 
Milton's sonnet; and that is a public tribute 
with no suggestion of private intimacy in it. 
Indeed, as Masson has pointed out, it may 
easily be taken to mean more than it really 
does; for it was not written because Milton 
could not keep silence about his admiration 
of Cromwell, but rather, as its full title shows, 
as a petition or appeal to Cromwell to save 
the nation from parliamentary proposals for 
the setting up of a State Church and for 
limiting the toleration of dissent from it. 
The sonnet, then, proves less than it has 
sometimes been made to prove; and in any 
case it proves no intimacy. Perhaps after 
all, in the case of Milton as in that of most 
men who deal with public affairs, we are apt 
to exaggerate the importance in their daily 
lives of these visible official activities. The 
world thinks it knows men who fight battles, 
or make speeches, or write books; but it 
knows nothing of their private thoughts or 
studies and still less of their private loves 
and joys and sorrows which to themselves 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 69 

and in truth are much the most real part 
of their Hves. So with Milton during these 
years; his wife and little children may have 
been, his second wife and such friends as 
Cyriack Skinner and Henry Lawrence and 
Lady Ranelagh and the poet Marvell certainly 
were, much greater realities to him in his 
daily thoughts than either the hated Salmasius 
and Morus of the pamphlets or the admired 
Cromwell of the sonnet. The " weekly table 
he is said to have kept, at the expense of the 
State, for foreign ministers, must have pro- 
vided interesting talk; but the true Milton 
cannot have lived in these gatherings so fully 
at. the time or remembered them afterwards 
so affectionately as those other more intimate 
parties of which he gives us a picture in the 
two sonnets to La^vrence and Skinner which, 
for lovers of poetry, look so pleasantly back 
to Horace and so pleasantly forward to 
Cowper and Tennyson. 

" Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son, 
Now that the fields are dank, and ways 

are mire, 
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by 

the fire 
Help waste a sullen day, what may be 
won 
From the hard season gaining? Time will 
run 



70 MILTON 

On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire 

The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh 
attire 

The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor 
spun. 
What neat repast shall feast us, light and 
choice. 

Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may- 
rise 

To hear the lute well touched, or artful 
voice 
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air? 

He who of those delights can judge, and 
spare 

To interpose them oft, is not unwise." 

This is his own graver and older parallel to 
what his nephew tells us of his schoolmastering 
days when he would turn from " hard Study 
and spare diet " to " drop once a month or 
so into the society of some young sparks of 
his acquaintance,'* and with them " would so 
far make bold with his body as now and then 
to keep a gawdy day." The sonnet shows 
that the poet is still the poet of U Allegro and 
// Penseroso, no narrow fanatic, but a lover 
of company and the arts, and of the richness 
and fulness of life. Such occasions as that 
it describes must have been oases in the 
desert of controversy and public business 
abroad and of blindness and loneliness at 
home. He did not live long in Whitehall, 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 71 

moving in 1652 to a house overlooking St. 
James's Park, near what is now Queen Anne's 
Gate. There his first wife died in 1653, or 
1654, and her short-Hved successor too ; there 
he Hved during the remaining years of the 
Commonwealth, working at his pamphlets and 
State papers, even beginning Paradise Lost, 
with young friends to read to him, write for 
him, lead their blind great man about in the 
Park or elsewhere, till the catastrophe of 1660 
arrived and it was no longer safe for the 
defender of Regicide to be seen in the streets. 
Why Milton was not hanged at the Restora- 
tion is still something of a mystery. His 
name must have been more hatefully known 
to the returning exiles than that of any one 
except the dead Cromwell whose death did 
not save his body from a grim ceremony at 
Tyburn. He had not only defended Charles 
I's execution before all Europe, and in a tone 
almost of exultation, but he had pursued the 
whole Stuart family with vituperation and 
contempt. Even in the very last weeks, when 
the bells were already almost ringing for 
Charles II, he had dared to raise his voice 
against the " abjured and detested thraldom 
of kingship " ; declaring that he would not be 
silent though he should but speak " to trees 
and stones : and had none to cry to, but 



72 MILTON 

with the prophet ' O Earth, Earth, Earth 1 * 
to tell the very soil itself what her perverse 
inhabitants are deaf to," — a passage, if inter- 
preted by its original context, of awful im^ 
precation upon Charles I. A man so famous, 
so utterly unrepentant, so defiant to the very 
end, seemed to challenge to himself the gallows. 
That his challenge would receive its natural 
answer was the openly expressed opinion of his 
enemies. No doubt it was also the fear of his 
friends, who concealed him in Smithfield from 
May till August 1660. By the 24th of August 
the danger was over. The Act of Indemnity, 
which was a pardon to all political offenders 
not by name excepted in it, became law on 
that day; and Milton's was not one of the 
excepted names. How was that managed? 
There are various stories; perhaps each has 
some truth in it; many influences may have 
combined. One is that he had saved Davenant 
in his danger some years before and now the 
Cavalier poet in his turn saved the Puritan. 
But Davenant was not in Parliament, and the 
real work must have been done by a group of 
friends who were. The most important of 
them seem to have been Annesley (afterwards 
Lord Anglesey), Sir Thomas Clarges, who 
was Monk's brother-in-law. Monk's secretary 
Morrice, and the poet's less powerful but 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 73 

still more devoted friend Andrew Marvell. 
Between them somehow they saved him, 
aided no doubt by the general pity for a 
blind man, the general respect for his learn- 
ing which found expression even in that 
moment and even in Royalist pamphlets, 
and, one may hope, by the knowledge of a 
few of them that this was a man of genius 
from whom there might be great things yet 
to come. The names of those who thus made 
possible the greatest poem in the English 
language deserve lasting record ; and a word 
of gratitude may be added to Clarendon and 
to Charles II for refraining from saying the 
easy and not unnatural word which would 
have been instantly fatal to their old enemy. 
The odd thing is that he was arrested after 
all. There had been an order of the House 
of Commons for his arrest and for the burning 
of his books, possibly, as Masson thinks, 
obtained by his friends to make it seem 
unnecessary to except him in the Indemnity 
Bill. The books were duly burnt, or such 
copies of them as came to the hands of the 
hangmain ; and ultimately, at some uncertain 
date, Milton himself was got into the custody 
of the Sergeant-at-Arms. He was soon re- 
leased, and the story would not be worth 
relating but for a curious proof it gives of the 

C2 



74 MILTON 

obstinate courage of the poet. The House 
ordered his release on December 15; and one 
would have supposed that he would have 
been glad to escape into obscurity and safety 
again on any terms. But no; the Sergeant- 
at-Arms demanded high fees which Milton 
thought unreasonable; and even then, when 
he had almost felt the hangman's rope on 
his neck, he would not be bullied by any 
man. He refused to pay: and though the 
Solicitor-General ominously remarked that he 
deserved hanging, his friends got the fees 
referred to a committee and presumably 
reduced. Before the beginning of 1661 he 
was definitely a free man to live his final 
fourteen years of political defeat, isolation 
and silence, of unparalleled poetic fertility, and, 
before the end, of acknowledged poetic fame. 
He did not return any more to the fashion- 
able and therefore dangerous neighbourhood 
of Whitehall, but lived the rest of his life in a 
succession of houses in or near the city, ending 
in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, where he 
died. His friends must for years have feared 
that he might be attacked and perhaps 
murdered by some drunken Cavalier revellers 
accidentally coming across the old regicide. 
And in spite of the Act of Indemnity he can 
hardly have felt absolutely comfortable on 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 75 

the side of the law when so late as 1664 his 
Tenure of Kings was denounced by the censor 
as still extant and an unfortunate printer 
was hanged, drawn and quartered for issuing 
a sort of new version of it. Misfortunes with- 
out and fears within might be the summing 
up, if not of the poet's, at least of the man's 
life during these first years after the Re- 
storation. To begin with, he was a much 
poorer man. His salary as Secretary was, of 
course, gone. But besides that he had lost 
£2000, equal to about £7000 now, which he 
had invested in Commonwealth Securities, as 
well as some confiscated property he had 
bought of the Chapter of Westminster; and 
he was soon to lose, at least temporarily, the 
rent he received from his father's house in 
Bread Street which was destroyed by the Fire 
of London. Masson calculates that he was 
left after the Restoration with an income about 
equal to £700 of our money which his further 
losses and outlay on his daughters had re- 
duced to £300 or £350 before his death ; not 
quite poverty even at the end, but something 
very different from what the eldest son of a 
rich man had been accustomed to. A graver 
misfortune was the gout which afflicted him 
for the rest of his life and gave him so much 
pain that he made little of his blindness in 



76 MILTON 

comparison with it. Worst of all was his 
unhappy relation to his daughters. That is 
the ugliest thing in the story of his life. How 
things might have gone with his son, if the 
baby boy had lived, one does not know ; but 
his oriental views of the moral and intellec- 
tual inferiority of women, which doubled the 
dangers of their fascinations, made him certain 
to be a despotic father to three motherless 
girls. And so he was. He had plenty of 
young men eager for the privilege of reading 
to him : but of course they could not be always 
with him, and the result was that dreadful 
picture which comes to us from his nephew, 
no unfriendly witness, of the daughters " con- 
denmed to the performance of reading and 
exactly pronouncing of all the languages of 
whatever book he should at one time or other 
think fit to peruse; viz. the Hebrew (and, I 
think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the 
Italian, Spanish and French," none of which 
languages they understood. Nor did he show 
any desire that they should; saying grimly 
that one tongue was enough for a woman. 
History and fiction are alike full of the 
tragedies that result from the blindness of 
extraordinary minds to ordinary duties; and 
Milton's case is one of the saddest. The 
daughters cheated him and made away with 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 77 

his books; he spoke of them gravely and 
repeatedly as his " unkind children " ; one of 
them is even reported, on very good evidence, 
to have said, at his third marriage in 1663, 
that " that was no news to hear of his wedding 
but, if she could hear of his death, that was 
something." At last it was thought better 
that he and they should part ; and they were 
put out, at considerable expense to their 
father, to learn embroidery work and other 
" curious and ingenious manufactures " for 
their living. It is pleasant to hear that the 
youngest, Deborah, who was visited by 
Addison not long before he died, and received 
fifty guineas from Queen Caroline, was " in a 
transport " of delight when shown a portrait 
of her father, crying out " 'Tis my father, 'tis 
my dear father, I see him; 'tis him; 'tis the 
very man 1 here, here ! " as she pointed to 
some of the features. So one likes to be told, 
on her authority, that he was delightful com- 
pany and " the life of the conversation, full 
of umaffected cheerfulness and civility " when 
he had his littJe parties of friends. And to 
us, if not to her, it is a pleasant story that she 
could still repeat many lines from Homer, 
Euripides and Ovid, though she said she did 
not understand Greek or Latin. The wife of 
a Spitalfields weaver must at last have felt 



78 MILTON 

some pride in these survivals of her childish 
drudgery, proof audible to all men, if to her 
unintelligible, that she was the daughter of 
Mr. Milton, the great scholar and poet. 

No more need to be said of sorrow or failure. 
The rest is a serene and productive old age. 
Paradise Lost was published in 1667, Paradise 
Regained and Samson in 1671. Besides these 
there was, in 1673, a new edition of his earlier 
poems reprinted, with additions from that of 
1645; and many publications of prose works 
mostly written in earlier years but never 
printed, such as his History of Britain, and 
little books on Education, Logic and Grammar. 
He kept up his strenuous life of study and 
composition apparently to the end. He is 
said to have got up at four or five in the 
morning, and, after hearing a chapter or two 
from the Hebrew Bible and breakfasting, to 
have passed the five hours before his midday 
dinner dictating or having some book read to 
him. In the afternoon he would walk a little 
in his garden; all his life a garden had been 
one of the things he would not do without. 
Then music and more private study carried 
him on to an Horatian supper of olives or 
other " light things " ; and so to a pipe of 
tobacco, a glass of water and bed. He drank 
but little wine, and that only with his meals. 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 79 

Such a way of life deserved a healthful old age, 
which, but for that healthy man's disease the 
gout, he had, and a death such as he had, 
so easy as to be imperceptible to the by- 
standers. That was on November 8, 1674. 
Four days later his body was buried in the 
church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where his 
grave may still be seen; the funeral being 
accompanied by " all his learned and great 
friends in London, not without a concourse 
of the vulgar." 

By that time the battle of his life had been 
won. The astonishing achievements of his 
last years had more than fulfilled the high 
promise and proud words of his long distant 
youth. Perhaps no seven years in all literary 
history provide a finer record of poetic genius 
triumphing over difficulties external and in- 
ternal than these last seven of Milton's life 
from 1667 to 1674. They had their reward 
and not only from posterity. There is a still 
lingering delusion, based chiefly on the five 
pounds paid for the first edition of Paradise 
Lost, that Milton's greatness was little recog- 
nized in his lifetime. The truth is the exact 
reverse. He had far more chance of hearing 
his own praises, if he cared for that, than 
most of the great English poets : than Keats 
and Shelley, for instance; than Wordsworth, 



80 MILTON 

at least till he was old ; nay, in all probability 
than Shakspeare himself. Which of them 
heard the most popular poet of their day say 
of them anything at all like Dryden's famous 
and generous " This man cuts us all out and 
the ancients too"? It is not even true that 
Paradise Lost sold badly. On the contrary, 
in a year and a half from the day of publica- 
tion over thirteen hundred copies had been 
sold, from which the author received £10 
and the publisher, it is believed, £50 or £60. 
He would be a sanguine publisher to-day who 
would be quite certain of making in eighteen 
months the modern equivalent of this sum, 
say £180, out of a new epic, even if it were 
as great as Milton's. 

But the money question was not of the first 
importance to Milton and is of none to us. 
The interesting thing is the almost immediate 
recognition of the greatness of the poem. 
Nothing in the world could be more alien to 
the tone of the society and literature of the 
London of Charles II than this long Biblical 
Puritan poem with its scarcely veiled attacks 
on the revived Monarchy and Episcopacy and 
its entirely unveiled attacks on the fashionable 
men of Belial. Yet it was from the very high 
priests of this society that the most unstinted 
praise came. Of its professional men of 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 81 

letters Dryden was already rapidly advancing 
to the unquestioned primacy which was soon 
to be his, and to remain his for his life ; of its 
amateurs Lord Dorset had perhaps the most 
brilliant reputation. It was these two men 
who, more than any others, made the town 
recognize the greatness of Milton. Both were 
as imlike Milton as men could be, and Dryden 
had just committed himself to a strong 
championship of rhymed verse as against 
blank. There is nowhere a finer proof of the 
compelling power of great art upon those who 
know it when they see it than the unbounded 
praise with which Dryden at once saluted 
Milton. The fact that his admiration at first 
took the absurd form of turning Milton's epic 
into a " heroic opera " in rhyme does not 
detract from the significance of his writing 
publicly within a year of Milton's death that 
the blind old regicide's poem was " one of 
the greatest, most noble and sublime which 
either this age or nation has produced," and 
to this he was to add, thirteen years later, the 
still bolder tribute of the well-known epigram 
about " three poets in three distant ages born " 
which gives Milton a place above Homer and 
Virgil. The lines are in detail absurd; but 
their absurdity does not destroy the fact that 
the intellectual life of England was never 



82 MILTON 

keener, or more eager to welcome talent in 
art or letters, than in the reign of Charles II ; 
and nothing is clearer proof of it than the 
honours received by the rebel Milton from a 
Court composer like Henry Lawes, a Court 
physician like Samuel Barrow, a statesman 
and minister like Lord Anglesey, and a poet 
laureate like Dry den. 

So we may think of him happily enough 
in these last years. He had now done the 
work which from his early manhood he had 
felt it was his task in life to do. When he 
was not much over thirty he had boldly 
written in public of what his mind, "in the 
spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty 
to propose to herself, though of highest hope 
and hardest attempting; whether that epic 
form whereof the two poems of Homer, and 
those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a 
diffuse and the book of Job a brief model . . . 
or whether those dramatic constitutions, 
wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign, shall 
be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a 
nation." For the moment nothing seemed 
to come of these high words; but before he 
died not one only, but both of his dreams, 
the drama as well as the epic, were accom- 
plished facts. Paradise Lost, begun as a 
drama, had become the greatest of modern 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 83 

epics; and the abandoned drama had re- 
appeared in Samson, not the greatest of 
English tragedies, but the one which best 
recalls the peculiar greatness of the drama of 
Greece. Self-confident young men have always 
been common enough, but there are two 
differences between them and Milton : their 
performance falls far short of their promise 
instead of exceeding it; and neither promise 
nor performance is marked by this exalting 
and purifying sense of a thing divinely inspired 
and divinely aided. Such work can wait, as 
his did, being such as is " not to be raised 
from the heat of youth or the vapours of 
wine ; like that which flows at waste from the 
pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher 
fury of a rhyming parasite; nor to be ob- 
tained by the invocation of dame memory and 
her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to 
that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all 
utterance and knowledge, and sends out his 
seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to 
touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases." 
Now the task is done ; and he can sit alone 
in his upstairs room in Artillery Walk and 
thank God that in spite of blindness, private 
sorrows and public disappointments, he had 
been enabled at last to bear the witness of a 
work of immortal beauty to the high truth 



84 MILTON 

that had been in him even from a boy. So 
it may have been in the graver moments of 
soHtude; while, as we know from several 
sources, there were other times, when he 
would enjoy the companionship of friends 
and the homage of learned strangers by 
whom we are told he was " much visited, 
more than he did desire." The picture sug- 
gested to us is that of a man who at sixt/- 
five, then a greater age than now, retained 
all his powers of mind and much of the 
physical beauty which had been so remarkable 
in his youth ; who was gracious but somewhat 
reserved and dignified with strangers; a 
delightful companion to friends and especially 
to younger men ; full of literature, especially 
of poetry, and with a memory that enabled 
him to recite long passages from Homer and 
Virgil; above all, an ardent lover of music, 
making a practice, so far as possible, of hearing 
some, whether vocal or instrumental, every 
afternoon. His ears were eyes to him; and 
when he heard a lady sing finely he would 
say : " Now will I swear this lady is hand- 
some.'* All kinds of music, and not only the 
severer, were delightful to the " organ- voice 
of England." 

That is not the least interesting thing about 
jhim, The greatest of England's fmtms 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 85 

was also the greatest of her artists. He 
had nothing in him of the morbid scrupulosity 
which is such an inhuman feature in French 
Jansenism and some of the English sects. 
His was a large nature which demanded a 
free expansion of life. Lonely figure as he is 
in our literary history, with no real pre- 
decessors or followers, his mighty arch yet 
bridges the gulf between Elizabeth and the 
Revolution, and is of nearer or less distant 
kin to Shakspeare than to Pope. His prose 
is the swan song of the old eloquence, as 
inspired and as confused as an oracle. To 
read it when it is at its best is to soar on 
wings through the empyrean and despise 
Swift and Addison walking in neat politeness 
on the pavement. There as everywhere, in 
his verse, in his character, in his mind, in 
his life, he has the strength and the weakness 
of an aristocrat. The youth who in his 
Cambridge days was " esteemed a virtuous 
person yet not to be ignorant of his parts " 
did not belie the opinion formed of him in 
either of those respects. His Republicanism 
was of the proud Roman sort, and at least as 
near Coriolanus as Gracchus; a boundless 
faith in the State and a boundless desire to 
spend and be spent in its service, a total and 
scornful indifference to the opinions of all 



86 MILTON 

those, though they might be five-sixths of 
the nation, who did^not desire to be served in 
the way which he had decided to be for their 
good. The modern way of deciding matters 
of State by counting heads may very hkely 
be the best of many unsatisfactory ways of 
accomplishing a very difficult business; but 
it has always been peculiarly exasperating to 
men of genius who see their way plainly and 
cannot understand why a million blind men 
are to keep them out of it. Milton liked the 
voice of the majority well enough when he 
could plead it against Charles I; but when 
he found it calling for Charles II he treated 
it as a mere impertinent absurdity; the vain 
babble of a " misguided and abused multi- 
tude '* with whom wise men have nothing to 
do except to keep them in their place. And 
it is in the latter attitude that he is most 
really himself. His is, of course, an aris- 
tocracy of mind and character, not of birth 
and wealth; but the self-sufficient scorn 
which was almost a virtue in Aristotle's eyes, 
and is in ours the besetting sin of even the 
noblest of aristocrats, is too frequent a note 
in all his prose, and even in his poetry; and 
it is sometimes poured out upon those who 
are fitter subjects for tenderness than for 
contempt. One can scarcely imagine a child 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 87 

or an ignorant man being quite at ease in 
Milton's company. 

But these are the penalties that greatness 
has too often to pay for being itself. So long 
as we remain human beings and not divine, 
it will be found hard to unite humility, ease 
of manner, and the glad sufferance of fools 
with a mind struggling in a storm of sublime 
thoughts, with powers that are and know 
themselves to be far above those of ordinary 
men. It will never be easy for men of supreme 
genius to behave to their inferiors as if they 
were their equals. But that is not the side 
of Milton of which v/e ought to think most 
often now. It is more just as well as more 
merciful to him, and it is of more use to 
ourselves, to fix our eyes on his strength, 
and not on the weakness that more or less 
inevitably accompanied it. The ancients ad- 
mired strength more than the moderns have, 
at least until lately. But no one can refuse 
to admire such strength as IMilton's, so con- 
tinuous, so triumphant over exceptional ob- 
stacles, so disdainful of all petty or personal 
ends. There is a majesty about it to which 
one scarcely knows any real parallel. Strength 
implies purpose and art implies unity of con- 
ception ; the instinct of art was only less strong 
in Milton than the resolute will; so that it 



88 MILTON 

is not surprising that scarcely any life has 
such unity as his. It is itself a perfect work 
of art. If we put aside, as we may fairly, 
the partial political inconsistencies, the rest 
is absolutely of one piece; a great building, 
nobly planned from the beginning and nobly 
executed to the last harmonious detail of 
the original design. We men are, most of 
us, weak creatures who accomplish but the 
tiniest fragments of even such poor designs 
as we make for our lives. There is something 
that uplifts us in the spectacle of the triumph- 
ant completion of so great a plan as the life 
of Milton. We are exalted by the thought 
that, after all, we are of the same flesh and 
blood, nay, even of the same breed, as this 
wonderful man. To read the Paradise Lost 
is to realize, in the highest degree, how the 
poet's imagination can impose a majestic 
order on the tumultuous confusion of human 
speech and knowledge. To read its author's 
life is to realize, with equally exalting clear- 
ness, how a strong man's will can so victori- 
ously mould a world of adverse circumstances 
that affliction, defeat — nay, even the threaten- 
ing shadow of death itself — are made the very 
instruments by which he becomes that which 
he has, from the beginning of his years, chosen 
for himself to be. 



CHAPTER III 

THE EARLIER POEMS 

We think to-day of Milton chiefly as the 
author of Paradise Lost, as we think of Wren 
as the builder of St. Paul's. And we are 
right, Wheii a man has been the creator of 
the only very great building in the world 
which bears upon it from the first stone to 
the last the mark of a single mind, his other 
achievements, even though they include 
Greenwich, Hampton Court, Trinity College 
Library, and some fifty churches, inevitably 
fall into the background. So when the world 
has admitted that a poet has disputed the 
supreme palm of epic with Homer and Virgil, 
it hardly cares to remember that he has also 
challenged all rivals in such forms as the 
Pastoral Elegy, the Mask, and the Sonnet. 
Be minimis non curat might be applied to 
such cases without any very violent ex- 
travagance. The first thought that must 
always rise to the mind at the mention 
of Milton's name must be the stupendous 
achievement of Paradise Lost, 

Yet if Milton had been hanged at Tyburn 



90 MILTON 

in 1660 he would still unquestionably rank 
with the half-dozen greatest of the English 
poets. Chaucer and Spenser would then have 
ranked after Shakspeare as higher names 
than his : and possibly also Wordsworth, 
Keats and Shelley. But he could have feared 
no other rival : for Dryden is too much a 
mere man of letters, Pope too much a mere 
wit, Byron too exclusively a rhetorician, 
Tennyson too exclusively an artist, to rank 
with a man in whom burned the divine fire 
of Lycidas and the great Ode. What would 
Milton's fame have rested upon if he had 
not lived to write Paradise Lost and its two 
successors? Upon the volume published in 
the year 1645, the year of Naseby, when 
people, one would have supposed, were not 
thinking much of poetry, and those who were 
most likely to be doing so were just those 
least inclined to look for it from John Milton, 
the Puritan pamphleteer. Yet in that little 
book was heard for the last time the voice, 
now raised above itself, of the old poetry 
which the Cavaliers and courtiers had loved. 

No single volume has ever contained so 
much fine English verse by an unknown 
or almost unknown poet. It is true that 
Lycidas and Comus had been printed before, 
but Comus had appeared anonymously and 



THE EARLIER POEMS 91 

Lycidas had been signed only with initials. 
So that only friends, or people behind the 
scenes in the literary world, could know any- 
thing of Milton's poetry. Nor does he seem 
to have been very anxious that they should. 
The other contributors to the volume in 
memory of Edward King gave their names : 
the only signature to Lycidas is J. M. It was 
Lawes the composer, not IVIilton the author, 
who published Comus in 1637. Milton's 
feelings about it are indicated by the motto 
on the title page — 

" Eheu quid volui misero mihi I floribus 
Austrum 
Perditus— " 

Quotations can often say for us what we 
cannot say for ourselves. What Virgil says 
for Milton is " Alas what is this that I have 
done ? poor fool that I am, could not I have 
kept my tender buds of verse a little longer 
from the cutting blasts of public criticism ? " 
Yet no one knew better than Milton that 
Comus was incomparably the greatest of the 
masks. So in the sonnet on reaching the 
age of twenty-three he says that his " late 
spring no bud or blossom shew'th." Yet he 
had already written the Ode on the Nativity, 
a performance sufficient, one would have 



92 MILTON 

thought, to give a young poet reasonable 
self-satisfaction in what he had done, as well 
as confidence in what he would be able to do. 
Nor was Milton in the ordinary sense, or per- 
haps in any, a humble man. Of that false 
kind of humility, too often recommended 
from the pulpit, which consists in a beautiful 
woman trying to suppose herself plain, or an 
able man trying to be unaware of his ability, 
no man ever had less than Milton. Neither 
from himself nor from others did he ever con- 
ceal the fact that he was a man of genius. 
In his eyes no kind of untruth, however 
specious, could be a virtue. But of a finer 
humility, built on truth, he was not without 
his share. The truly humble man may be a 
genius and may know it and may never affect 
to deny it : he may know that he has done 
great things, far greater than have been done 
by the men he sees around him : but he is 
not judging himself by the standard of other 
men : he has another standard, that of " the 
perfect witness of all- judging Jove," that of 
" as ever in my great Taskmaster's eye," and 
of that he knows how very far he has fallen 
short. Of this nobler humility Milton had 
something all his life and in his youth much. 
It is this which reconciles the apparent in- 
consistency between his many proud con- 



THE EARLIER POEMS 93 

fessions that he knows himself to be a man 
called to do great things and his reluctance 
to let the world see what he had already done : 
between his keeping V Allegro and 11 Pense- 
roso ten years unpublished and his preserving 
and ultimately publishing almost everything 
he had ever written, even to scraps of boyish 
and undergraduate verse. From one point of 
view his best was nothing : from the other, 
more than equally true, the humblest line 
that had come from his pen had received a 
passport to immortality. 

What does the famous volume contain? 
It opens with the noble Ode on the Nativity, 
as if to give the discerning reader invincible 
proof in the first twenty lines put before him 
that the proud words of the publisher's preface 
were amply justified. " Let the event guide 
itself which way it will, I shall deserve of the 
age by bringing into the light as true a birth 
as the Muses have brought forth since our 
famous Spenser wrote ; whose poems in these 
English ones are as rarely imitated as sweetly 
excelled. Reader, if thou art eagle-eyed to 
censure their worth, I am not fearful to expose 
them to thy exactest perusal." So the preface 
ends : and then what follows is — 

*' This is the month, and this the happy morn, 
Wherein the Son of Heaven's Eternal King, 



94 MILTON 

Of wedded maid and virgin mother born, 
Our great redemption from above did bring ; 
For so the holy sages once did sing, 

That he our deadly forfeit should release. 
And with his Father work us a perpetual 
peace.'* 

Magnus ah integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. 
No one had ever written such English verse 
as this before : no one ever would again. 
Here was a poet, writing at the age of twenty- 
one, for whom it was evident that no theme 
could be so high that he could not find it fit 
utterance. Fit and also peculiar to himself. 
The peculiar Miltonic note which none of his 
innumerable imitators have ever caught for 
more than a few lines, which he himself never 
in all his works loses for more than a moment, 
is instantly struck. As Mr. Mackail has said, 
" there is not a square inch of his poetry from 
first to last of which one could not confidently 
say, ' This is Milton and no one else.' " One 
may even go further than Mr. Mackail. For 
he seems to make an exception where cer- 
tainly none is needed. He is justly insisting 
that one of the most remarkable things about 
Milton is that, while English poetry spoke 
one language in his youth and another in his 
age, he himself spoke neither. His " accent 
and speech " alike in Lycidas and in Paradise 



THE EARLIER POEMS 95 

Lost are his own, and in marked contrast to 
those of contemporary poets. But here Mr. 
Mac kail adds the qualification " if we exclude 
a few slight juvenile pieces of his boyhood 
and those metrical versions of the Psalms in 
which he elected not to be a poet." He 
asserts, that is, that neither in the Psalms 
nor in the " juvenile pieces " is Milton 
characteristically himself and that in the 
Psalms he is not a poet at all. And no one 
will care to deny that many of the versions 
of the Psalms have Uttle Milton and less 
poetry in them. But is this true of all? 
And in particular is it true of the paraphrase 
of Psalm cxxxvi. which, with its companion 
version of Psalm cxiv. is the most " juvenile " 
of all? A boy of fifteen has not usually 
much power of " electing " to be or not to be 
a poet. But it can only be inadvertence on 
Mr. Mackail's part that would deny that the 
boy Milton at that age, though not a great 
poet, was already himself and, more than 
that, was already promising what he was 
soon to perform. Who, looking back from 
the Ode and Comus and Paradise Lost, does 
not hear some preluding of the authentic 
strain of Milton in 

" Who by his all-commanding might 
Did fill the new-made world with light " ? 



96 MILTON 

Is it fanciful to note that we have here, no 
doubt in their barest primitive form, two of 
Milton's life-long themes? The Authorized 
Version speaks of " him that made great 
Hghts " : how Miltonieally transformed those 
words already are in the two quoted lines ! 
De Quincey said that Milton was " not an 
author amongst authors, not a poet amongst 
poets, but a power amongst powers." How- 
ever that may be, it is certain that he, so 
occupied all his life with thinking and writing 
about God, thought of Gk)d habitually as a 
power. For him God is Creator, Sovereign, 
Judge, much more often than Father : we 
hear from Milton more of his might than of 
his love. So at once here, at the age of 
fifteen, he inserts into the Psalm he is para- 
phrasing that characteristic phrase, so splen- 
did and potent itself, so gladly speaking of 
potency and splendour, 

" Who by his all-commanding might." 

And, if power be one of the most frequent 
elements in the Miltonic thought, what is more 
frequent than light in the Miltonic vision ? And 
is not that substitution of " did fill the new- 
made world with light " for the bare scientific 
statement of the original, a foretaste of the 
Milton who, all his life, blind or seeing, felt 



THE EARLIER POEMS 97 

the joy and wonder of light as no other man 
ever did? Do we not rightly hear in it 
a note that will soon be enriched into 
the " Light unsufferable " of the Ode^ the 
" endless morn of Light *' of the Solemn Music, 
the " bosom bright of blazing Majesty and 
Light " of the Epitaph on Lady Winchester, 
and, not to multiply quotations, of the " Hail, 
holy Light " which opens the great invocation 
of the third book of Paradise Lost ? 

It may be as well, before discussing the Ode 
and the other contents of the volume issued 
in 1645, to mention another poem which is of 
earlier date than the Ode, though it was not 
printed till 1673 : the beautiful Spenserian 
lines On the Death of a Fair Infant. They 
afford the most real of the exceptions to the 
rule that Milton is always from the beginning 
to the end unmistakably and solely himself. 
In this poem he shows himself at the age of 
seventeen so soaked in Spenser and Spenser's 
school that, when his baby niece dies and he 
sets himself to make her an elegy, what he 
gives us is these graceful verses conveying as 
much as a boy of seventeen can catch of the 
lovely elegiac note of Spenser. 

" O noble Spirit : live there ever blessed 
The world's late wonder, and the heaven's 
new joy ; 

D 



98 MILTON 

Live ever there, and leave me here distressed 
With mortal cares and cumbrous world's 
annoy." 

So sings Spenser of Sidney : and, though IVIilton 
is scarcely yet more the equal of Spenser than 
his baby niece was of Sidney, it is a beautiful 
echo of his master that he gives us in his 

" O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted, 
Soft silken primrose fading timelessly," 

and in 

" Yet can I not persuade me thou art dead, 
Or that thy corse corrupts in earth's dark 

womb. 
Or that thy beauties lie in woitmy bed. 
Hid from the world in a low delved tomb." 

The poem is full of the then fashionable 
conceits, which appear again a little in the 
Ode, after which they are for ever put aside by 
Milton's imaginative severity and high con- 
ception of poetry as a finer sort of truth than 
prose, not a more ingenious kind of lying. 
Once, and perhaps once only, one hears in it 
the voice of the Milton of later years — 

" Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire 
To scorn the sordid world, and unto Heaven 
aspire." 

But with the Ode the age of imitation is 
over for Milton and he stands forward at once 

/ 



THE EARLIER POEMS 99 

as himself. The soft graces, somewhat lack- 
ing in outline, of the Fair Infant, are forgotten 
in the sonorous strength of the Ode, The 
half-hesitating whisper has become a strain 
of mighty music; the uncertain hand has 
gained self-confidence so that the design now 
shows the boldness and decision of a master. 
At once, in the second stanza, he is away to 
heaven, with a curious anticipation of what was 
to occupy him so much thirty years later — 

'* That glorious form, that hght unsufferable, 
And that far-beaming blaze of majesty. 
Wherewith he wont at Heaven's high council- 
table 
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity, 
He laid aside ; and, here with us to be, 

Forsook the courts of everlasting day. 
And chose with us a darksome house of 
mortal clay." 

Milton's genius was universal, in the strict 
sense of the word, that is, living in or occupied 
with the universe. He is as supramundane 
in his way as Shelley in his. And no part of 
the universe was more real to him than heaven, 
the abode of God and angels and spirits, the 
original and ultimate home of his beloved 
music and light. It is noticeable that there 
is hardly a single poem of his — V Allegro 
and Samson are the only important ones — in 



100 MILTON 

which he does not at one point or other make 
his escape to heaven. In most of them, as 
all through this Ode and the Solemn Music, 
in the conclusions of Lycidas and II Penseroso, 
in the opening of Comus, this heavenly flight 
provides passages of exceptional and pecu- 
liarly Miltonic beauty. The fact is that, 
though little of a mystic, he was from the 
first entirely of that temper, intellectually 
descended from Plato, morally from Stoicism 
and Christianity but more from Stoicism, 
which cannot be content to be " confined and 
pestered in this pinfold here," disdains the 
" low-though ted cares " of mere bodily and 
temporal life, and habitually aspires to live 
the life of the mind and the spirit, 

" Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot 
Which men call Earth." 

So here at once, in his first important poem, 
what in other hands might have been a mere 
telling of the old human and earthly story of 
the first Christmas night becomes in Milton's 
a vision of all time and all space, with heaven 
in it, and the stars, and the music of the 
spheres, and the great timeless scheme of 
redemption with which he was to have so 
much to do later, with history, too, and litera- 
ture, the false gods of the Old Testament 
and of the Greek and Roman classics already 



THE EARLIER POEMS 101 

anticipating the parts they were to play in 
Paradise Lost. 

And note one other thing. Milton is only 
twenty-one, but he is already an incomparable 
artist. The stanza had been so far the usual 
form for lyrics, and he adopts it here for 
the first and last time. But if he accepts 
the instrument prescribed by tradition, with 
what a master's hand this wonderful boy of 
twenty-one touches it, and to what astonish- 
ing music ! It seems that the stanza itself is 
his OT\T[i. Every one has felt the combination 
in it, as he manages it, of the romantic move- 
ment and suggestion which he loved and 
renounced with the classical strength which 
is the chief element in the final impression 
he made on English poetry. As yet the 
romantic quality is the stronger, and even 
one of the mighty closing Alexandrines is 
dedicated to the lovely Elizabethan fancy of 
the " yellow skirted fayes '* who 

" Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their 
moon-loved maze.'* 

How such a line as that, or still more plainly 
the two which end the most romantic stanza of 
all— 

" No nightly trance, or breathed spell. 
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the 
prophetic cell " 



102 MILTON 

found a rejoicing echo in Keats is obvious. 
This, of course, has often been noticed. But 
has it ever been remarked that there are also 
lines in the poem which might have been 
written by another nineteenth-century poet 
of equal but very different genius ? 

" The winds, with wonder whist, 
Smoothly the waters kissed, 
Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean ; '* — 

should we be surprised to come upon these 
elemental loves and joys heralding a new 
reign of justice and peace in the Prometheus 
Unbound ? 

But neither Keats nor Shelley, who both 
had their affinities to Milton, had it in him 
to reach the concentrated Miltonic energy of 
such lines as — 

" The wakeful trump of doom must thimder 

through the deep," 
or — 

" Than his bright throne or burning axletree 
could bear." 

Almost every one of these final Alex- 
andrines, it is to be observed, sums up the 
note of its stanza in a chord of majestic 
power. They are the most Miltonic lines 
in the poem; for it is precisely "majesty" 



THE EARLIER POEMS 103 

which is the unique and essential IVIiltonic 
quality; and Dry den in the famous epigram 
ought to have kept it for him and not given 
it to Virgil, though by doing so he would 
have made his splendid compliment im- 
possible. 

Among the poems that followed in the 
1645 edition were the Passion, a failure 
which Milton recognized as a failure and 
abandoned, but yet, characteristically, did 
not refuse to publish; the Epitaph on the 
Marchioness of Winchester, which, still youth- 
ful as it is and is seen to be by the frigid 
and false antithesis of Queen and Marchioness 
with which it ends, has yet very beautiful 
lines — 

" Gentle Lady, may thy grave 
Peace and quiet ever have ! 
After this thy travail sore. 
Sweet rest seize thee evermore " ; 

the famous lines on Shakspeare, contributed 
anonymously to the second Folio; and the 
noble outburst of heavenly music which 
begins — 

" Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's 

joy 

Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and 
Verse." 



104 MILTON 

This was written some years later; and 
even after Paradise Lost it may rank as the 
most daring and entirely successful of Milton's 
long-sustained wheelings of musical flight. 
The stanza no longer provides him with space 
enough : and here his whole twenty-eight 
lines are one continuous strain, with no 
break in them and scarcely any pause, in 
ten-syllabled lines of boldly varied rhyme 
and accent. His task here is not so difficult 
as it was to be in Paradise Lost, for he has 
rhyme to provide him with variety and he 
admits two verses of six syllables among his 
twenty-eight; but already he is completely 
master of the possibilities of the ten-syllable 
line, and can make it yield as lavish a wealth 
of variety in unity as was later on to make 
the great passages of Paradise Lost an eternal 
amazement to lovers and practisers of the art 
of verse. 

" Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power 

employ. 
Dead things with inbreathed sense able to 

pierce ; 
And to our high-raised phantasy present 
That undisturbed song of pure concent." 

They are all the same line, and yet how 
different. It is difficult to believe that this 
is the same metre which Waller and Dryden 



THE EARLIER POEMS 105 

were soon, amid universal applause, to file 
down into the smooth monotony of — 

" Great wits are sure to madness near allied. 
And thin partitions do their bounds divide ; 
Else why should he, with w^ealth and honour 

blest. 
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest ? " 

For Dryden, as still more for Pope and 
the school of Pope, the thing to accomplish, 
so far as possible, is to prevent any of the 
natural accents falling upon the third, fifth 
or other odd syllables ; there is, for instance, 
not one which does so in the first fifty lines 
of Absalom and Achitophel or of the Epistle 
to Arbuthnot. The object of Milton, on the 
contrary, is to vary the position of his accents 
to the utmost possible extent compatible 
with the preservation of the verse. In these 
four lines his first accent falls on the first 
syllable in the first two, probably on the 
fourth in the third, and on the second in the 
last. And the other accents are similarly 
varied in place and, it may be added, in 
number. In Milton's case the listener's won- 
der is at the number and intricacy of the 
variations he can play upon the theme of his 
verse; in Pope's it is at the amazing clever- 
ness with which it can be exactly repeated in 

D2 



106 MILTON 

different words. Milton's music, too, is con- 
tinuous, not broken into couplets sharply 
divided from each other. His verses pass 
into each other as wave melts into wave on 
the sea -shore; there is a constant breaking 
on the beach, but which will break and which 
will glide imperceptibly into its successor 
we cannot guess though we sit watching 
for an hour; the sameness of rise and 
fall, crash and silence, is unbroken, yet no 
one wave is exactly like its predecessor, no 
two successive minutes give either eye or 
ear exactly the same experience. So with 
Milton's verse; even the ocean of Paradise 
Lost has few or no waves of music of more 
varied vmity, of more continuous variety than 
such lines as — 

" As once we did, till disproportioned sin 
Jarred against Nature's chime and with 

harsh din 
Broke the fair music that all creatures 

made 
To their great Lord, whose love their motion 

swayed 
In perfect diapason whilst they stood 
In first obedience and their state of good." 

The chief remaining minor poems of Milton 
are the Atlegro and Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas 
and the Sonnets. The two first are written 



THE EARLIER POEMS 107 

in those rhymed eight-syllable lines which he 
had already used in part of his Song on May 
Morning. Like that beautiful little poem, 
they represent him in his simplest mood, the 
mood of the quiet years at Horton, spent, 
more than any other part of his life, in the 
open air, and among plain folk unlettered and 
unpolitical. It is natural enough, therefore, 
that they are the most popular as they 
are the easiest of all his poems. Their two 
titles, which mean The Cheerful Man and 
The Thoughtful or Meditative Man, point to 
the two moods from which they regard life. 
Both moods are, of course, described as 
they might actually be experienced by a 
highly cultivated and serious man like Milton 
himself. The gravity is the gravity of a man 
of thought, not of a man of affairs; the 
pleasures are those of a scholar and a poet, 
not those of a trifler, a sportsman, or a 
sensualist. Like all Milton's works they 
borrow freely from earlier poets, remain 
entirely original and Miltonic, and are imi- 
tated only at the peril of the imitator. Any 
one who looks at the parallel passages in 
Marlowe and Fletcher will see how very like 
they are and how very little the likeness 
matters. The poems stand alone; there is 
nothing of quite the same kind in English. 



108 MILTON 

The least unlike pair of poems is perhaps the 
two Spring Odes of the present Poet Laureate, 
than whom no one has owed more to Milton 
or repaid the debt with more verse which 
Milton would have been glad to inspire. 
But Mr. Bridges has, of course, avoided any- 
thing approaching a direct imitation ; he has 
merely used the hint of two contrasted poems 
on one subject, touching inevitably, as Milton 
had touched, upon some of the opposite 
pleasures of town and country, and bringing 
Milton's mood of cheerful gravity to bear 
upon them both. 

It is unnecessary to discuss in detail poems 
so well known. But a few words may be 
said. Milton was never again to be so genial 
as he is here. Never again does he place 
himself so sympathetically close to the daily 
tasks and pleasures of ordinary unimportant 
men and women. After characteristically 
choosing the West Wind and the Dawn as 
likelier parents of true mirth than any god 
of wine or sensual pleasure, he will go on for 
once to call for the company of — 

" Sport that wrinkled Care derides, 
Aiid Laughter holding both his sides " ; 

he will cast a pleased eye on the birds and 
flowers and the sunrise — the latter moving 



THE EARLIER POEMS 109 

him to the characteristic magnificence which 
in this poem he has elsewhere forgone ; he 
will recognize, with the gratefulness of the 
tired student, the careless gladness in the 
voices of ploughman and milkmaid, as he 
passes them in his early morning walk. Then 
he will give a glance to beauty which such as 
they cannot see, or cannot be fully conscious 
of seeing — 

" Mountains on whose barren breast 
The labouring clouds do often rest " ; 

will touch on the romance of old towers and 
poetic memories of which they have only 
dimly heard, and look back at Thyrsis 
and Cory don and all the pastoral poetry 
which such scenes recall to the scholar's 
memory. The next section of the poem is 
taken from a different world, that of the 
merry England of the Middle Age with its 
ale and dances and Faery Mab ; while the final 
one carries us quite away from the rustics to 
the town and the town's pleasures, pageantry 
and drama and music — this last, as always, 
moving the poet to peculiar rapture, and an 
answering music of verse — 

*' The melting voice through mazes running, 
Untwisting all the chains that tie 
The hidden soul of harmony." 



110 MILTON 

II Penseroso is the praise of Melancholy as 
L' Allegro of Mirth. But Milton was not a 
melancholy man in our sense of the word. 
When Keats declares that — 

"in the very temple of Delight 
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,'* 

he is interpreting a mood into which Milton 
could not even in imagination enter, that of 
the intellectual sensualist who dreams his life 
away and cannot act. Milton was a man 
of action and character, and his Melancholy, 
quite unlike this, is that of the Spirit in his 
own Comus, who " began — 

" Wrapt in a pleasing fit of melancholy, 
To meditate my rural minstrelsy." 

He hails her at once as a " Goddess sage and 
holy " and as a " Nun devout and pure " ; 
and it is evident from the first that her 
sorrows, so far as she is sorrowful, are those 
of aspiring spirit, not those of self-indulging 
and disappointed flesh. Her life of quiet 
studies and pleasures is self -chosen; there is 
a note of will and self-control in the words 
in which the poet bids her call about her 
Peace and Quiet and Spare Fast, Retired 
Leisure and Contemplation and Silence; and 
the descriptions which follow of his walks 



THE EARLIER POEMS 111 

and studies and pleasures, in town and 
country, by night and morning, are those 
of a man who has deUberately shaped his 
Hfe, and means so to live it that he shall 
leave it without regret or shame and with the 
hope of passing from it to a better. 

Nor is it any mood of mere melancholy 
that has given us in this poem such pleasant 
glimpses of his walks abroad and studies at 
home in these Horton years. He pays his 
tribute to Plato, the Greek tragedians and 
the dramatists of Elizabethan and Jacobean 
England; and to his own two most famous 
predecessors, Chaucer and Spenser; and we 
think of the scholarly hours spent gravely 
and quietly but far from unhappily. More 
delightful still, with more beauty and more 
happiness in them, are the poem's well-known 
landscapes — 

" the wandering moon, 
Riding near her highest noon, 
Like one that had been led astray 
Through the heaven's wide pathless way.'* 

Perhaps no one again, till Shelley came, felt 
the vastness, the pathlessness, of the heaven 
as Milton did. Or, to come to earth again, 
where does poetry set the ear more instantly 
and actively at the work of imaginative 



112 MILTON 

creation than in those finely suggestive lines 
about the curfew — 

" Over some wide- watered shore, 
Swinging slow with sullen roar *' ? 

And what of that woodland solitude at 
noon, with memories in it of so many poets 
of Greece, Rome, Italy and England, the 

" shadows brown, that Sylvan loves. 
Of pine, or monumental oak. 
Where the rude axe with heaved stroke 
Was never heard the Nymphs to daunt 
Or fright them from their hallowed haunt," 

which carries us on to perhaps the loveliest 
lines in all the Paradise Lost — 

" In shadier bower. 
More sacred and sequestered, though but 

feigned. 
Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph 
Nor Faunus haunted.'* 

There is in the two passages just the difference 
between the youth and maturity of genius; 
but that is all. So // Penseroso passes on its 
delightful way, ending, of course, in music 
and heaven. 

- There, too, " before the starry threshold 
of Jove's court," the next of these earlier 
works of Milton, the mask Comus^ begins. 



THE EARLIER POEMS 113 

It strikes its high note at once in what an 
old lover of literature boldly called " the 
finest opening of any theatrical oiece ancient 
or modern.'* 

" Before the starry threshold of Jove's court 
My mansion is, where those immortal 

shapes 
Of bright aerial spirits live insphered 
In regions mild of calm and serene air, 
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot 
Which men call Earth, and, with low- 

thoughted care, 
Confmed and pestered in this pinfold here. 
Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being, 
Unmindful of the crown that Virtue gives, 
After this mortal change, to her true 

servants 
Amongst the enthroned gods on sainted 

seats." 

That looks forward to Paradise Lost, not 
backward to the masks of the previous 
generation of poets. The " loud uplifted 
angel -trumpet " is sounded in it, and we 
know that we have travelled a long way from 
the trivial, superficial and often coarse enter- 
tainments which would have been the models 
of Comus if Milton had been the man to 
accept models of any kind, least of all of 
such a kind. Like them his mask was an 
aristocratic entertainment, played to a noble 



114 MILTON 

audience by the scions of a great house. 
But the resemblance scarcely goes further. 
The older masks were mainly spectacles; 
magnificent spectacles indeed, designed some- 
times, as one may see in the Chatsworth 
Library, by such artists as Inigo Jones and 
produced at immense expense; but just for 
that reason addressed to the eye much more 
than to the ear, and scarcely at all to the 
mind. Even when written by such a man as 
Ben Jonson, the words, except in the lyrics, 
are of almost no importance. The business 
was to show a number of pretty scenes, and 
noble ladies, and to give them a chance of 
exhibiting their clothes, and their voices. 
The last gave Jonson his chance; the fine 
Horatian workman that he was could always 
produce a lyric that would fit any situation 
and give some dignity to any trivial person- 
age. But the taint of vanity and fashion, 
pomp and externality, ine^dtably clung to 
the whole thing. Too many personages were 
introduced, probably because in such plays 
there were always a great many applicants 
for parts ; and the inevitable result was that 
in a short piece none of them had space to 
develop any character or life. But Milton 
knew, as the Greeks knew and Shakspeare 
did not always, that in the few hours of a 



THE EARLIER POEMS 115 

stage performance only a very few characters 
have time to develop themselves in such a 
way as to interest and convince the hearer's 
imagination, and that if there are many they 
never become more than a list of names. So 
he, who could not touch anything without 
giving it character, limits his personages to 
four or five that they may at least be human 
beings and not mere singers of songs or 
allegorical abstractions. And, like some of 
his predecessors, he takes an ethical theme, 
the praise and power of Chastity. Fletcher 
in The Faithful Shepherdess had taken the 
same; as Jonson had taken the praise of 
Temperance, which is also partly Milton's 
subject, in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, in 
which a grosser Comus is one of the char- 
acters. But to get any parallel to the power 
of conviction with which Milton handles it 
one has to go behind Jonson, whose mask is 
an entirely superficial performance, and even 
behind Fletcher, in whose Shepherdess the 
many beautiful and moving touches are lost 
in a crowd of characters and a wilderness of 
artificial intrigue; one has to go back to the 
man whom Milton once called his " original," 
to the author of the Faerie Queen. No one 
but Spenser could have anticipated the scene 
between Comus and the Lady, where indeed 



lie MILTON 

Milton, like Spenser in the bower of Acrasia, 
has lavished such wealth upon his sinner that 
he has hardly been able to give a due over- 
balance to his saint. Yet she is no lay figure, 
and one is not surprised that Comus should 
twice show his consciousness that she has 
within her some holy, some more than mortal 
power. Milton has given her a song of such 
astonishing music that one wonders whether 
the composer Lawes, for whom the whole was 
written, could touch it without injury — 

*' Sweet Echo, sweetest Nymph, that liv'st 
unseen 
Within thy airy shell 
By slow Meander's margent green, 
And in the violet-embroidered vale 

Where the love-lorn nightingale 
Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth 

well; 
Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pair 
That likest thy Narcissus are ? 

O, if thou have 
Hid them in some flowery cave, 
Tell me but where. 
Sweet Queen of Parley, Daughter of the 

Sphere ! 
So mayst thou be translated to the skies. 
And give resounding grace to all Heaven's 
harmonies." 

The lyrics were the chief beauty of the old 
masks, but the best of them sink into i»* 



THE EARLIER POEMS 117 

significance before such a masterpiece of art 
as this. Perhaps nothing in a modern language 
comes nearer to giving the pecuHar effect 
which is the glory of Pindar. Of course there 
is in it more of the fanciful, and more of the 
romantic, than there was in Pindar; and its 
style is tenderer, prettier and perhaps alto- 
gether smaller than his. But the elaborate 
and intricate perfection of its art and language, 
the way in which the intellect in it serves the 
imagination, is exactly Pindar. In any case it 
is certainly one of the most entirely beautiful 
of English lyrics. One listens with delight 
to the musician working out his intricately 
beautiful theme ; or is it nearer the impression 
we get to say that we watch the skilful dancer 
executing his elaborate figure ? In either case 
we await with sure confidence the triumphant 
close. The final couplet, by the way, and par- 
ticularly the great Alexandrine, is a curious 
anticipation of Dryden's finest manner. But 
the rest is a music Dryden's ear never heard. 
No wonder Comus cries — 

" Can any mortal mixtiu'e of earth's mould 
Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment ? 
Sure something holy lodges in that breast, 
And with these raptures moves the vocal 

air 
To testify his hidden residence. 



118 MILTON 

How sweetly did they float upon the wings 
Of silence, through the empty- vaulted night, 
At every fall smoothing the raven down 
Of darlmess till it smiled I " 

The last lines show that Milton has not yet 
outgrown the Jacobean taste for conceits. So 
a little later on we find him writing that — 

" Silence 
Was took ere she was ware, and wished she 

might 
Deny her nature, and be never more 
Still to be so displaced " ; 

a piece of intellectual trickery such as Shak- 
speare too often played with, and Donne 
laboured at; and one of a special interest 
because we see it again later transformed and 
purified in the famous passage of Paradise 
Lost, in which " Silence was pleased " not 
only with the stillness of evening, but also 
with the song of the bird whose "amorous 
descant " alone interrupts it. Yet even that 
seemed to Warton, the best of Milton's early 
critics, a conceit unworthy of the poet. So 
difficult it is for " rational " criticism to see 
the distinction between an intellectual ex- 
travagance and a flight of the imagination. 

There are other things in Comus beside 
conceits which recall Shakspeare. What can 



THE EARLIER POEMS 119 

be more exactly in his freshest youngest 
manner than such a line as — 

" Love-darting eyes and tresses like the 
morn " ? 

And what can be closer to the note of the 
great Histories and Tragedies than the Elder 
Brother's outburst of faith — 

" If this fail, 
The pillared firmament is rottenness. 
And earth's base built on stubble " ? 

I see no reason whatever to doubt, in 
spite of what has lately been said by a 
modern critic and poet, that these speeches 
of the Brothers and the Lady, rather than 
those of Comus, represent IVIilton's own con- 
ception of life. It is true, of course, that 
Comus was one of several masks performed 
as an aristocratic counterblast to the attack 
of Prynne and the Puritans on all stage 
performances. But that only strengthens the 
proof of Milton's own leaning to a grave and 
temperate mode of life. Even when he writes 
a mask he will insist that it shall be a thing 
of noble art and serious moral. He was no 
narrow-minded fanatic and will write a piece 
for great ladies to perform when asked by his 
accomplished friend Lawes : but he is already 



120 MILTON 

the man who was later to denounce "court 
amours, Mix*d dance and wanton masque " ; 
and if he writes a mask himself it will be 
to take the old " high-flown commonplace " 
of the magic power of chastity and give it an 
entirely new seriousness and beauty. The 
notion of Mr. Newbolt that there were two 
Miltons, one before and the other after the 
Civil War, and that the one was " sincerely 
engaged on the side of liberal manners '* 
while the other was an ill-tempered enemy of 
civilization and the arts of life, is a complete 
delusion. The " Lady of Christ's " who was 
unpopular on account of his severe chastity, 
was already a strict Puritan of the only sort 
he ever became; and the author of Paradise 
Lost, as all the evidence shows, was no morbid 
sectary but a lover of learning and music and 
society. Of course, no man goes unchanged 
through a great struggle such as that to 
which Milton gave twenty years of life. 
There is a development, or a difference, call 
it what you will, between the Dante who 
wrote the Vita Nuova and him who wrote 
the Divina Commedia, That could not but 
be; a body that had gone into exile and a 
soul that had visited hell must leave their 
traces on a man. But the essential Dante 
remains one and the same all the while. And 



THE EARLIER POEMS 121 

so does Milton. Nothing can be more certain 
than that the grave boy whose gravity im- 
pressed all Cambridge, and had taken immortal 
shape in the Nativity Ode and the sonnet of 
the " great Taskmaster's eye " before he was 
much past twenty, did not mean to hold up a 
drunken sensualist like Comus as a model for 
youth. He was not an ascetic, then or later ; 
and he was writing a dramatic poem; and, 
of course, had no difficulty in giving Comus a 
fine speech about the follies of total abstinence 
which, indeed, he loved no better than other 
monkeries. The Lady, in reply, as she is 
dramatically bound, over-exalts her " sage 
and serious doctrine of Virginity " as Comus 
had overstated the case against it ; but what 
she praises is Temperance, not Abstinence. 
Her virginity is that of a free maiden, not that 
of a vowed nun, and there is nothing in it to 
unfit her to play the part which, when Eve 
plays it, gives Milton occasion for his well- 
known apostrophe to true love. Nor is there 
any inconsistency between his denunciation 
of " wanton masks " in that passage, and his 
being the author of Comus, His own mask 
was as different as possible from those others, 
the common sort, in which he saw the pur- 
veyors of " adulterous lust," and with which, 
now as then, he would have nothing whatever 



122 MILTON 

to do. His " Lady " alone, even without her 
brothers, makes that clear. What she says 
may not be so poetically attractive as the 
speech of Comus ; but it has just the note of 
exaltation which is heard in all Milton's great 
ethical and spiritual outbursts, and plainly 
utters the other and stronger side of his con- 
victions. The truth is that from the very 
beginning to the very end of his life Milton 
had all the intensity of Puritanism, more 
than all its angry contempt of vice, but 
nothing whatever of its uncivilized narrow- 
mindedness. A large part of the peculiar 
interest of his character lies in the fact that 
he, almost alone of Englishmen, managed to 
unite the strength of the Reformation with the 
breadth of the Renaissance. We have both 
in the lovely verses which are the Epilogue 
of Comus; and if it begins with — 

" the gardens fair 
Of Hesperus, and his daughters three 
That sing about the golden tree : '! 



and the 



Beds of hyacinth and roses 
Where young Adonis oft reposes, 
Waxing well of his deep wound 
Li slumber soft, and on the ground 
Sadly sits the Assyrian queen " ; 



THE EARLIER POEMS 123 

it ends with the Stoic Puritan motto, " Love 
Virtue, she alone is free." And that these 
last six lines were no formal compliment to 
the conventions is proved by the fact that 
Milton chose the final couplet — 

" if Virtue feeble were 
Heaven Itself would stoop to her," 

as the motto he appended to his signature in 
the album of an Italian Protestant at Geneva 
in 1639, adding the significant Latin which 
claims the sentiment as utterly his own — 

" Caelum, non animum, muto dum trans mare 
curro." 

These words we, looking back on his whole 
life, may fitly translate : "I am always the 
same John Milton, whether in Rome, Geneva, 
or London, whether I write Covins or Allegro 
or Paradise Lost^ For never were unity and 
continuity of personality more complete than 
in Milton. 

There remains Lycidas, in which Milton out- 
distances all previous English elegy almost as 
easily as in Comus he had out-distanced all 
the earlier masks. It stands with the great 
passages of Paradise Lost as the most con- 
summate blending of scholarship and poetry 
in Milton and therefore in English. All 



124 MILTON 

pastoral poetry is in it, Theocritus and 
Virgil, Spenser and Sidney, Drayton and 
Drummond, with memories, too, of Ovid 
and Shakspeare and the Bible; and yet it 
is pure and undiluted Milton, with the signet 
of his peculiar mind and temper stamped on 
its every phrase. It was his contribution to 
a volume of verses published at Cambridge 
in 1638 to the memory of Edward King, a 
younger contemporary of his at Christ's who 
was drowned off the Welsh coast in August 
1637. King was already a Fellow of his 
college, and one of the most promising young 
clergymen of his day. Milton had liked and 
respected him, no doubt, but had certainly 
not been so intimate with him as with young 
Charles Diodati who died almost exactly a 
year later, and was lamented by his great 
friend in the Epitaphium Damonis which is 
the finest of the Latin poems. Those who 
read Latin will enjoy its close parallelism 
with Lycidas and its touches of a still closer 
bond of affection, as that in which the poet 
contrasts the easy friendships of birds and 
animals, soon won, soon lost and soon re- 
placed by others, with their hard rareness 
among men who scarcely find one kindred 
spirit in a thousand, and too often lose that 
one by premature fate before the fruit of 



THE EARLIER POEMS 125 

friendship has had time to ripen. But if 
the death of Diodati aroused the deeper 
sorrow in Milton, that of King produced 
unquestionably the greater poem. It is a 
common mistake to think that to write a 
great elegy a man must have suffered a great 
sorrow. That is not the case. Shelley wrote 
Adonais about Keats whom he knew very 
little ; Spenser Daphnaida about a lady whom 
he did not know at all. It is not the actual 
experience of sorrow that the elegiac poet 
needs; but the power of heart and imagina- 
tion to conceive it and the power of language 
to give it fit expression. Moreover, the poet's 
real subject is not the death of Keats or King 
or Mrs. Gorges : it is the death of all who 
have been or will be loved in all the world, 
and the sorrow of all the survivors, the tragic 
destiny of youth and hope and fame, the 
doom of frailty and transience which has 
been eternally pronounced on so many of 
the fairest gifts of Nature and all the noblest 
works of man. 

About Lycidas criticism has less to say 
than to unsay. Johnson's notorious attack 
upon it is only the extremest instance of 
the futility of applying to poetry the tests 
of prose and of the general incapacity of 
that generation to apply any other. Even 



126 MILTON 

Warton, who really loved these early poems 
of Milton and did so much to recall them to 
public notice, could speak of him as appearing 
to have had " a very bad ear "I At such a 
time it was inevitable that the artificial 
absurdity of pastoral poetry which is a prose 
fact should blind all but the finest judges to 
the poetic fact that living spirit can animate 
every form it finds prepared for its indwelling. 
Johnson and the rest were right in perceiving 
that pastoral elegy had very commonly been 
an insincere affectation, a mere exercise 
in writing; the age into which they were 
born denied them the ear that could hear 
the amazing music of Lycidas, or perceive 
the sensuous, imaginative, spiritual intensity 
which drowns its incongruities in a flood of 
poetic life. There is a still more important 
truth which that generation could not see. 
Prose aims at expressing facts directly, and 
sometimes succeeds. That is what Johnson 
liked, and practised himself with masterly 
success. But when he and his asked that 
poetry should do the same they were asking 
that she should deny her nature. She knows 
that her truth can only be expressed or sug- 
gested by its imaginative equivalents. It is 
with poetry as with religion. Religious truth 
stated directly becomes philosophy or science, 



THE EARLIER POEMS 127 

conveying other elements of truth, perhaps, 
but failing to convey the element which is 
specifically religious; and therefore religion 
employs parable, ceremony, sacrament, mys- 
tery, to express what scientifically exact prose 
cannot express. So poetry can neither deal 
directly with King's death or Milton's grief 
nor be content with a subject which is a 
mere fact in time and space. If it did, the 
effect produced would not be a poetic effect; 
the experience of the reader would not be a 
poetic experience. The poet must transform 
or transcend the facts which have set his 
powers to work; he must escape from them 
or rather lift them up with him new-created 
into the world of the imagination ; he must 
impose upon them a new form, invented or 
accepted by himself, and in any case so heated 
by his own fire of poetry that it can fuse and 
reshape the matter submitted to it into that 
unity of beauty which is a work of art. That 
is what Milton does in Lycidas by the help of 
the pastoral fiction; and what he could not 
have done without it or some imaginative 
substitute for it. 

The truest criticism on his pastoralism is 
really that that mould was too small and 
fragile to hold all he wanted to put into it. 
The great outburst of St. Peter, with its 



128 MILTON 

scarcely disguised assault upon the Laudian 
clergy, strains it almost to bursting. Yet no 
one would wish it away ; for it adds a passage 
of Miltonic fire to what but for Phoebus and 
St. Peter would be too plaintive to be fully 
characteristic of Milton whose genius lay 
rather in strength than in tenderness. Yet 
perhaps we love Lycidas all the more for 
giving us our almost solitary glimpse of a 
Milton in whom the affections are more than 
the will, and sorrow not sublimated into 
resolution. Its modesty, too, is astonishing. 
He had already written the Nativity Ode, 
Comus and Allegro and Penseroso, and yet 
he fancies himself still unripe for poetry and 
is only forced by the " bitter constraint " of 
the death of his friend to pluck the berries of 
his laurel which seem to him still " harsh and 
crude " ; for of course these allusions refer to 
his own immaturity and not, as Todd thought, 
to that of his dead friend. And the presence 
of the same over-mastering emotion which 
compelled him to begin is felt throughout. 
There is no poem of his in which he appears 
to make so complete a surrender to the chang- 
ing moods of passion. The verses seem to 
follow his heart and fancy just where they 
choose to lead. We watch him as he thinks 
first of his friend's death and then of the 



THE EARLIER POEMS 129 

duty of paying some poetic tribute to him; 
and so of his own death and of some other 
poet of the future who may write of it and — 

" bid fair peace be to my sable shroud." 

How natural it is in all its superficial un- 
naturalness I The walks and talks and verses 
made together at Cambridge so inevitably 
leading to the " heavy change now thou art 
gone, Now thou art gone and never must 
return"; and the fancy, partly but not 
wholly a reminiscence of their classical studies, 
that the trees and flowers which they had 
loved together must now be sharing the 
survivor's grief; the reproach to Nature and 
Nature's divinities following on the thought 
of Nature's sympathy, and followed by the 
first of the two incomparable returns upon 
himself which are among the chief beauties of 
the poem — 

" Ay me I I fondly dream I 
*Had ye been there,' for what could that 
have done ? " 

And so to the vanity of earthly fame and 
the thought of another fame which is not 
vanity. Twice he seems to be going to 
escape out of the world of pastoral, as he 
strikes his own trumpet note of confident 



130 MILTON 

faith and stern judgment ; twice the unfailing 
instinct of art calls him back and makes a 
beauty of what might have been a mere 
incongruity — 

" Return, Alpheus ; the dread voice is past, 
That shrunk thy streams : return, Sicilian 

Muse, 
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast 
Their -^ bells and flowerets of a thousand 

hues." 

The flowers come, in their amazing beauty, as 
poetry knows and names them, not altogether 
after the order of nature; till the fine flight 
is once more recalled to earth in that second 
return to the sad reality of things which 
provides the most beautiful, and as the 
manuscript shows, one of the most carefully 
elaborated passages in the whole — 

" Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, 
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, 
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid 

lies. 
For so, to interpose a little ease. 
Let our frail thoughts dally with false 

surmise. 
Ay me 1 whilst thee the shores and sounding 

seas 
Wash far away, where'er thy bones are 

hurled. 
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, 



THE EARLIER POEMS 131 

Where thou perhaps under the whelming 

tide 
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world." 

The least critical reader, when he is told 
that the daffodil and amaranthus lines were 
once in the reverse order, that the " frail 
thoughts " were at first " sad," and the 
"chores " " floods," and above all that the 
" whelming tide " was once a thing so in- 
significant as the " humming tide," can judge 
for himself by what a succession of inspira- 
tions a work of consummate art is produced. 

There remain the sonnets, whose sufficient 
praise is given in an immortal line of Words- 
worth, while all that a fine critic had thought 
or learnt about them is contained in the 
scholarly edition of Mark Pattison. Techni- 
cally they are remarkable, like everything else 
of Milton's, at once for their conservatism 
and their originality ; while their content has 
all his characteristic sincerity. They occupy 
a most important place in the history of the 
English sonnet, which had so far been almost 
entirely given up to a single theme, that of 
the poet's unhappy love, which had com- 
monly little existence outside his verses. The 
shadowy mistresses who emulated the glories 
of Beatrice and Laura were even less sub- 
stantial than they; and, though that could 



132 MILTON 

not hinder great poets from making fine 
poetry out of them, it was fatal to the ordinary 
sonnetteer, and gave the sonnet a tradition of 
overblown and insincere verbiage. From all 
this Milton emancipated it and, as Landor 
said, " gave the notes to glory." To glory 
and to other things; for not all his sonnets 
are consecrated to glory. They deal with 
various subjects ; but each, whether its topic 
be his blindness, the death of his wife, or the 
fame of Fairfax or Cromwell, is the product 
of a personal experience of his own. No one 
can read them through without feeling that 
he gets from them a true knowledge of the 
man. At their weakest, as in that To a Lady, 
they convey, in the words of Mark Pattison, 
" the sense that here is a true utterance 
of a great soul." The rather commonplace 
thought and language somehow do not prevent 
the total effect from being impressive. He 
entirely fails only when he goes below the level 
of poetry altogether and repeats in verse the 
angry scurrility of his divorce pamphlets. 
And even there some remnant of his artist's 
sense of the self-restraint of verse preserves 
him from the worst degradations of his prose. 
For the rest, they give us his musical and 
scholarly tastes, his temperate pleasures and 
his love of that sort of company which Shelley 



THE EARLIER POEMS 133 

confessed to preferring, " such society as is 
quiet, wise and good " ; they give us the high 
ideal with which he became a poet, the high 
patriotism that drew him into poHtics, and 
that sense, both for himself and for others, 
of life as a thing to be lived in the presence 
and service of God which was the eternally 
true part of his religion. The four finest are 
those on the Massacre in Piedmont, On his 
Blindness, On attaining the age of twenty- 
three, and that addressed to Cromwell, which 
perhaps has the finest touch of all in the 
pause which comes with such tremendous 
effect after " And Worcester's laureate 
wreath." But that to the memory of his 
wife and " Captain or Colonel or Knight in 
Arms," the one addressed to Lawrence and 
the first of those addressed to Skinner, come 
very near the best ; and the whole eight would 
be included by any good judge in a collection 
of the fifty best English sonnets, to which 
Milton would make a larger contribution than 
any one except, perhaps, Wordsworth and 
Shakspeare. 

And both of these poets, Shakspeare always 
and Wordsworth often, sinned as Milton did 
not against the true genius of the sonnet. 
No doubt they had nearly all precedent with 
them, and their successors down to Rossetti 



134 MILTON 

and Meredith have followed in the same path. 
But not even Shakspeare and Petrarch can 
alter the fact that the genius of the sonnet 
is solitary and self-contained. A series of 
sonnets is an artistic contradiction in terms. 
There may be magnificent individual sonnets 
in it which can stand alone, without reference 
to those that precede or follow; and so far 
so good ; but on the bulk of the series there 
inevitably rests the taint of incompleteness. 
They do not explain themselves. They are 
chapters not books, parts of a composition 
and not the whole. It is scarcely possible to 
doubt that, fine as they may be, the effect 
they produce is not that of the finest single 
sonnets, beginning and ending within their 
own limits. Milton may never have been 
under any special temptation to write a set 
of consecutive sonnets ; but it is in any case 
like his habitual submission of all authority 
to his own judgment that he wrote sonnets 
and yet defied the tradition of writing them 
as a continuous series, as he had also disdained 
the amorous affectations which had been their 
established subject. But in this, as in every- 
thing else where art was concerned, he was 
as much a conservative as a revolutionary. 
And so his scholarly interest in the Italian 
sonnet, and, we may be sure, his consummate 



THE EARLIER POEMS 135 

critical judgment, made him set aside the 
various sonnet forms adopted by Shakspeare, 
Spenser and other famous English poets, and 
follow the original model of Petrarch more 
strictly than it had been followed by any 
English poet of importance before him; for 
the Petrarchan sonnets of Sidney, Constable 
and Drummond all end with the unltalian 
concluding couplet. But here again Milton's 
example has not proved decisive. Words- 
worth did not always follow it, though he 
never deserted it with success. Keats began 
with it and gave it up for the Shakspearean 
model with the concluding couplet. But of 
him again, it may be said that, while he only 
wrote three great sonnets and two of them 
are Shakspearean, his single masterpiece is 
Petrarchan or Miltonic. Rossetti, on the 
other hand, has no Shakspearean sonnets, and 
his finest are among the best proofs of how 
much a sonnet gains in unity by the single 
pause between the eight lines and the six 
instead of Shakspeare's fourfold division, and 
especially by the interlocking of the rhymes in 
the second half of the sonnet as opposed to 
Shakspeare's isolated and half-epigrammatic 
final couplet. 

There can be little doubt, though attempts 
have been made to deny it, that nothing but 



136 MILTON 

the prestige of the greatest of all poetic 
names has prevented the superiority of the 
Petrarchan model from being universally 
recognized. Shakspeare could do anything. 
But the greatness of his sonnets is due not to 
their form but simply to their being his ; and 
the fact that he could triumph over the 
defects of that form ought not to make other 
people fancy that these defects do not exist. 
They do ; and but for the courage and genius 
of Milton they might have dominated the 
history of the English sonnet to this day. 
That is part of our great debt to Milton. He 
could not give the sonnet the supple and 
insinuating sweetness with which Shakspeare 
often filled it. He had not got that in him, 
and perhaps it would scarcely have proved 
tolerable except as part of a sequence in 
which it could be balanced by sterner matter. 
Nor, again, could he give it Shakspeare's 
infinite tenderness, nor his sense of the world's 
brooding mystery. But he could and did 
give it his own high spirit of courage, sincerity 
and strength, and his own masterly cunning 
of craftsmanship. And no just reader of the 
greatest sonnets of the nineteenth century 
forgets Milton's share in their greatness. Mr. 
Lascelles Abercrombie has lately remarked 
that it is in the Prelude and Excursion of 



THE EARLIER POEMS 137 

Wordsworth that " more profoundly than 
anywhere out of Milton himself Milton's 
spiritual legacy is employed." The same 
thing may be as truly said of Wordsworth's 
sonnets. If, as he said, in Milton's hands 
" the thing became a trumpet," there is no 
doubt that it remained one in his own. He is 
a greater master of the sonnet than Milton; 
the greatest on the whole that England has 
known. He used it far more freely than 
Milton and for more varied purposes. Perhaps 
it hardly afforded room enough for one the 
peculiar note of whose genius was vastness. 
It is seldom possible to do justice to a quota- 
tion from Paradise Lost without giving at 
least twenty lines. The sense, and especially 
the musical effect, is incomplete with less; 
for a Miltonic period is a series of intellectual 
and rhythmical actions and reactions which 
cannot be detached from each other without 
loss. It is obvious that a poet whose natural 
range is so great can hardly be fully himself in 
the sonnet. But Wordsworth had little of this 
spacious freedom of poetic energy ; to him — 

" 'twas pastime to be bound 
Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground." 

And so he could use it for everything; for 
great events and also for very small; not 

£2 



138 MILTON 

exhausting great or small, but finding in each, 
whatever it might be, some single aspect or 
quality which he could touch to new power 
by that meditative tenderness of his to which 
Milton was, to his great loss, an entire 
stranger. The natural mysticism, for instance, 
of such sonnets as, " It is a beauteous evening, 
calm and free," or, " Earth has not anything 
to show more fair," is quite out of Milton's 
reach. In this and other ways Wordsworth 
could do much more with the sonnet than 
Milton could. But without Milton some of his 
very greatest things would scarcely have been 
attempted. All the sonnets that utter his 
magnanimous patriotism, his dauntless passion 
for English liberty, his burning sympathy with 
the oppressed, the " holy glee " of his hatred 
of tyranny, are of the right lineage of Milton 
himself. One can almost hear Milton crying — 

" It is not to be thought of that the Flood 
Of British freedom, which to the open sea 
Of the world's praise from dark antiquity 
Hath flowed ' with pomp of waters unwith- 

stood,' 
Roused though it be full often to a mood 
Which spurns the checks of salutary bands, 
That this most famous Stream in Bogs and 

Sands 
Should perish ; and to evil and to good 
Be lost for ever." 



THE EARLIER POEMS 139 

There and in the "Two Voices" and in the 
" Inland within a Hollow Vale " and in the 
Toussaint POuverture sonnet, and others, we 
cannot fail to catch an echo of the poet who 
first " gave the sonnet's notes to glory." No 
one can count up all the things which have 
united in the making of any poem, but among 
those which made these sonnets possible must 
certainly be reckoned the Fairfax and Crom- 
well sonnets, and above all the still more 
famous one on the Massacre in Piedmont. 
The forces which animated England to defy 
and defeat Napoleon were only partly moral ; 
but so far as they were that they found perfect 
expression through only one voice, that of 
Wordsworth. And there is no doubt as to 
where he caught the note which he struck 
again to such high purpose. He has told us 
himself — 

" Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour ; 
England hath need of thee." 

And, what seems stranger, he has now had 
in return a kind of reflected influence upon 
Milton. The total experience of a reader of 
poetry is a thing of many actions and re- 
actions, co-operating and intermingling with 
each other. And as we can hardly read Virgil 
or the Psalms now without thinking of all 



140 MILTON 

that has come of them, and reading some of it 
back into the old words whose first creator 
could not foresee all that would be found in 
them, so it is with Milton and Wordsworth. 
There are many things in Milton which no 
Wordsworthian can now read exactly as 
they were read in the seventeenth century. 
Wordsworth's line 

" Thy Soul was like a Star and dwelt apart " 

was strangely true of Milton as he lived in 
his own day. But it is less true now that 
his place is among the spiritual company 
of the English poets and that Wordsworth 
stands by his side, or sits at his feet. That 
does not detract from his greatness. Indeed, 
it adds to it ; for it is only the greater poets 
who thus transcend their own day and cannot 
be read as if they belonged to it alone. Read 
the great sonnet on the Massacre — 

" Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, 

whose bones 
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains 

cold; 
Even them who kept thy truth so pure 

of old, 
When all our fathers worshiped stocks 

and stones, 



THE EARLIER POEMS 141 

Forget not ; in thy book record their groans 
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient 

fold 
Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that 

rolled 
Mother with infant down the rocks. 

Their moans 
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they 
To heaven. Their martyred blood and 

ashes sow 
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth 

sway 
The triple Tyrant; that from these may 

grow 
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy 

way, 
Early may fly the Babylonian woe." 

Is there not more in it than the Hebrew 
prophet or psalmist and the English Puritan ? 
Is there not, for us now, something beside 
the past of which Milton had read, and the 
present which he knew by experience? Is 
there not an anticipation of another struggle 
against another tyrant — nay, the creation of 
the very spirit in which that struggle was to 
be faced ? So Milton influences Wordsworth 
and the England of Wordsworth's day; and 
they in their turn inevitably influence our 
minds as we read him. There lies one part of 
the secret of his greatness; a part which is 
seen at its highest in his sonnets. 



CHAPTER IV 

PARADISE LOST 

Paradise Lost is in several ways one of 
the most wonderful of the works of man. And 
not least in the circumstances of its composi- 
tion. The Restoration found Milton blind, 
and to blindness it added disappointment, 
defeat, obscuj-ity, and fear of the public or 
private revenge of his victorious enemies. 
Yet out of such a situation as this the most 
indomitable will that ever inhabited the soul 
of a poet produced three great poems, every 
one of which would have been enough to give 
him a place among the poets who belong to 
the whole world. 

The first and greatest of these was, of course, 
Paradise Lost Unlike many great poems, 
but like all the great epics of the world, it 
obtained recognition at once. It sold well for 
a work of its bulk and seriousness, and it 
received the highest praise from those whose 
word was and deserved to be law in questions 
of literature. Throughout the eighteenth 
142 



PARADISE LOST 143 

century its fame and popularity increased. 
Literary people read it because Dryden and 
Addison and all the established authorities 
recommended it to them, and also because 
those of them whose turn for literature was 
a reality found that these recommendations 
were confirmed by their own experience. But 
the poem also appealed to another and a 
larger public. To the serious world it ap- 
peared to be a religious book and as such 
enjoyed the great advantage of being thought 
fit to be read on the only day in the week on 
which many people were accustomed to read 
at all. This distinction grew in importance 
with the progress of the Wesleyan revival and 
with it grew the number of Milton's admirers. 
When Sunday readers were tired of the Bible 
they were apt to turn to Paradise Lost. How 
many of them did so is proved by the influence 
Milton has had on English religious beliefs. 
To this day if an ordinary man is asked to 
give his recollections of the story of Adam and 
Eve he is sure to put Milton as well as Genesis 
into them. For instance, the Miltonic Satan 
is almost sure to take the place of the scrip- 
tural serpent. The influence Milton has had 
is unfortunately also seen in less satisfactory 
ways. He claimed to justify the ways of God 
to men. Perhaps he did so to his own mind 



144 MILTON 

which, in these questions, was curiously 
matter-of-fact, literal, legal and unmystical. 
He was determined to explain everything and 
provide for all contingencies by his legal 
instrument of the government of the world : 
and he did so after the cold fashion of a 
lawyer defining rights on each side, and assum- 
ing that the stronger party will exert his 
strength. So far as his genius made his 
readers accept his views of the relation be- 
tween God and man it cannot be denied that 
he did a great injury to English religious 
thought. Everybody who stops to reflect 
now feels that the attitude of his God to the 
rebel angels and to man is hard and unfor- 
giving, below the standard of any decent 
human morality, far below the Christian 
oharity of St. Paul. The atmosphere of the 
poem when it deals with these matters is 
often suggestive of a tyrant's ^torney- 
general whose business is to find plausible 
excuses for an arbitrary despot. Milton had 
his share in creating that bad sort of fear of 
God which is always appearing as the thorn 
in the theological rose-bed of the eighteenth 
century, and, later on, becomes the night- 
mare of the Evangelical revival. None of 
these conceptions, the capricious despot, the 
remorseless creditor, the Judge whose in- 



PARADISE LOST 145 

variable sentence is hell fire, have proved 
easy to get rid of : and part of their perma- 
nence may be laid to the account of Paradise 
Lost 

But Milton, who is like the Bible in so 
many ways, is not least like it in his happy 
unconsciousness of his own immorality. The 
writer of the story of Samuel and Agag, or 
that of Rebekah and Jacob, was perfectly 
unaware that he was immoral : and so was 
Milton in Paradise Lost : and so also and for 
that very reason were the majority of their 
readers. Happily most of us when we read a 
book that makes for righteousness are like 
children reading Shakspeare, who simply do 
not notice the things that make their elders 
nervous. It is not that we refuse the evil 
and choose the good : we are quite unaware 
of the presence of the evil at all. No doubt 
that sometimes makes its influence the more 
powerful because unperceived : and for this 
kind of subtle influence both Milton and the 
Old Testament have to answer. But with 
many happy natures an escape is made by the 
process of selection : and, as they manage to 
acquire the God-fearing righteousness of the 
Old Testament without its ferocity, so they 
manage to receive from Milton his high 
emotional consciousness of life as the glad and 



146 MILTON 

free service of God and to ignore altogether 
his intellectual description of it as a very one- 
sided bargain with a very dangerous Potentate. 

Nor must Milton be made, as he often is, 
to bear more blame in this matter than he 
deserves. Divine tyranny with hell as its 
sanction was no invention of his. The 
Catholic Church, as all her art shows, had 
always made full use of it.f And the new 
horror of his own day, the Calvinist predestina- 
tion, he expressly and frequently repudiates. 
The free will of man is the very base of his 
system. In it men may suffer, as it seems to 
us, out of all proportion to their guilt ; but at 
least they suffer only for deeds done of their 
own free will. 

But the true answer to the charge of 
corrupting English religious thought so often 
brought against Milton is that while the harm 
he did must be admitted it was far outweighed 
by the good. It could not be for nothing that 
generations of readers, as they turned over 
Milton's pages, found themselves listening to 
the voice of a man to whom God's presence 
was the most constant of realities, the most 
active of daily and hourly influences : who, 
from his youth up, visibly glowed with an 
ardent desire for the service of God and man : 
who, whatever his faults were, had nothing 



PARADISE LOST 147 

base or mean about him, habitually thought 
of life as a thing to be lived on the heights, 
and by his exalted spirit and unconquerable 
will enlarges for those who know him the 
whole conception of what a human being may 
achieve. It could not be for nothing that on 
the topmost heights of English poetry stood 
a man who could scarcely finish a single one 
of his poems without some soaring ascent 
to heaven and heavenly things : whose most 
characteristic utterances for himself are such 
lines as 

" Toward which Time leads me, and the will 
of Heaven " ; 

or — 

" As ever in my great Task -Master's eye : " 

and for others as well as for himself such a 
hope as that which concludes his At a Solemn 
Music — 

" O, may we soon again renew that song, 
And keep in tune with Heaven, till God 

ere long 
To his celestial concert us unite. 
To live with Him, and sing in endless mom 

of light ! " 

Tu habe Deum prae oculis tuis, says the 
author of The Imitation : " Have thou God 



148 ' MILTON 

before Thine eyes." And so by his poetry 
and by his Ufe says Milton. The influence of 
such a man, whatever the faults of his intellec- 
tual creed, can hardly on the whole have been 
anything but a good one, either on those who 
heard his living voice or on those who for two 
hundred years have caught what they may of 
it from the printed pages of his books. 

So much it seemed worth while to say in 
defence of Milton whose sins in these matters 
have always been exaggerated by his ecclesias- 
tical and political opponents. But the effect, 
good or bad, which a great poem produces on 
opinion is a mere by-product : its essential 
business is nothing of that sort but the pro- 
duction in the minds of competent readers of 
the pleasure proper to a great work of the 
imagination. And this is the criterion by 
which the Paradise Lost, like every other 
work of the kind, must primarily be judged. 

The poem, as we have it, is the long delayed 
result of an intention formed in Milton's 
strangely ripe and resolute youth. Before 
he was thirty he spoke openly to his friends of 
writing a great poem which was, as he shortly 
afterwards had no hesitation in telling the 
public, to be of the sort that the world does 
not willingly let die. At first the subject was 
to have been the Arthurian legend which 



PARADISE LOST 149 

poets of all ages have found so fruitful. But 
that was soon abandoned, apparently for the 
reason that a little examination of the authori- 
ties convinced the poet that it was not histori- 
cally true. This fact has a literary as well as 
a biographical importance. Great artist as 
Milton was, he seems to have confused truth 
of art with truth of fact. He preferred a 
Biblical subject because it was his belief that 
every statement in the Bible was literally 
true. This belief, except from the emotional 
fervour it inspired in him, was a positive 
disadvantage to him as a poet. It circum- 
scribed his freedom of invention, it compelled 
him to argue that the action of his drama 
as he found it was already reasonable and 
probable instead of letting his imagination 
work upon it and make it so ; it made him aim 
too often at producing belief instead of delight 
in his hearers. This, of course, had obvious 
drawbacks as soon as people ceased to regard 
the first chapters of Genesis as a literal prose 
record of events which actually happened. 
For a hundred and fifty years many people 
read the Paradise Lost and supposed them- 
selves to be enjoying the poem when what they 
were really enjoying was simply the pleasure 
of reading their own beliefs expressed in 
magnificent verse. In the same way many 



150 MILTON 

religious people imagine that they enjoy early 
Italian art when they in fact enjoy nothing 
but its religious sentiment. But neither art 
nor poetry can live permanently on these 
extraneous supports. So when less interest 
came to be felt in Adam and Eve there were 
fewer readers for Paradise Lost. But the 
readers who were lost were not those that 
matter. For it is a complete mistake to say, 
as is sometimes said, that the fact that the 
story of Paradise Lost was once believed and 
now is so no longer is fatal to the interest of 
the poem. That is not so for the right reader : 
or at least, so far as it is so, it is Milton's 
fault and not that of his subject. The Mneid 
loses no more by our disbelief in the historical 
reality of ^neas or Dido than Othello loses 
by our ignorance whether such a person ever 
existed. The difficulty, so far as there is one, 
is not that many readers disbelieve the story 
of Milton's poem : it is that he himself 
passionately believed it. If he had been 
content with offering us his poem as an 
imaginative creation, if he had not again 
and again insisted on its historical truth and 
theological importance, no changes in the 
views of his readers, no merely intellectual 
or historical criticism, could have touched him 
more than they can Virgil. As a poet he is 



PARADISE LOST 151 

perfectly invulnerable by any such attacks : 
it is only so far as he deserted poetry for 
the pseudo-scientific matter-of-fact world of 
prose that he fails and irritates us. All the 
poetry of Paradise Lost is as true to-day as 
when it was first written : it is only the 
science and logic and philosophy, in a word 
the prose, which has proved liable to decay. 
There is always that difference between the 
works of the imagination and those of 
the intellect. A hundred theories about the 
Greek legends of the Centaurs or the Amazons 
may establish themselves, have a vogue, 
undergo criticism and finally be exploded 
as absurdities : that is the common fate of 
intellectual products after they have done 
their work. But the Centaurs of the Par- 
thenon and the Amazons of the Mausoleum 
are immortally independent of all changes of 
opinion. 

This is the first disadvantage of the subject 
chosen by Milton, that he believed in it too 
much. The fact that he did so and thought 
its prose truth all-important at once limited 
the freedom of his imagination and diverted 
him from the single-minded pursuit of the 
proper end of poetry. He was evidently 
quite unaware of this drawback and it has 
been little, if at all, noticed by his critics. 



152 MILTON 

On the other hand, he was perfectly aware 
of what would appear to other people to be 
the disadvantages involved in the choice of 
a subject so unlike those of previous epics. He 
speaks more than once of the novelty of this 
theme, the best-known allusion being the 
beautiful introduction to Book IX., in which 
he describes his subject, that of the human sin 
and the divine anger 

" That brought into this World a world of 
woe, 
Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery, 
Death's harbinger : " 

and contrasts it with those other sins and 
other angers on which Homer and Virgil 
built their poems. But he is not afraid of 
the contrast : he thinks it is all to his own 
advantage — 

" Sad task ! yet argument 
Not less but more heroic than the wrath 
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued 
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall ; or rage 
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused ; 
Or Neptune's ire or Juno's, that so long 
Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son : 
If answerable style I can obtain 
Of my celestial Patroness who deigns 
Her nightly visitation unimplored. 
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires 
Easy my unpremeditated verse, 



PARADISE LOST 153 

Since first this subject for heroic song 
Pleased me, long choosing and beginning 

late, 
Not sedulous by nature to indite 
Wars, hitherto the only argument 
Heroic deemed — " 

The whole passage is too long for quotation. 
Indeed, as we have already had occasion to 
notice, it is one of the difficulties of discussing 
Milton that quotation is almost always com- 
pelled to do him an injury by giving less than 
the whole of any one of those long-sustained 
flights of music in which he rises and falls, 
turns to the left hand or the right, as his 
imagination leads him, but always on un- 
flagging wings of undoubted and easy security. 
But enough has been quoted here to illustrate 
the poet's direct challenge of Homer and Virgil 
in this matter of subject. He was perfectly 
well aware that he was making an entirely 
new departure, not only from the subject of 
the ancients but also, as is shown by his 
detailed condemnation of " tilting furniture, 
emblazoned shields " and the rest, from those 
of such poets as Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser, 
He did it deliberately, with open eyes. And 
there is no doubt that he was at least partly 
right. To this day he and Dante, in their 
different ways, enjoy a common advantage 



154 MILTON 

over Homer, and still more over a poet mainly 
of fancy like Tasso, in the fact that their 
subject, that of the meaning and destiny of 
human life, is one in itself of profound and 
absorbing interest to all thinking men and 
women. Even if their treatment of it be in 
some parts and for some people unsatisfying 
or irritating they at least have started with 
that advantage. A dangerous advantage be- 
cause, as we have seen in Milton's case and 
might also see in Dante's, tempting them to 
go outside the pure business of their art; 
but still in itself an advantage. Milton was 
probably also right in feeling that the fighting 
element in the old poets had been greatly 
overdone. The most interesting parts of the 
Iliad for us to-day are not battles, but such 
things as the parting of Hector and Andro- 
mache and the scene between Priam and 
Achilles. Where the fighting still moves us, as 
in the case of Hector and Achilles, or Virgil's 
Turnus and Pallas, it is mainly for the sake 
of an accompanying human and moral interest 
altogether above its own. The miscellaneous 
details of weapons and wounds which evidently 
once gave so much pleasure are now equally 
tedious to us whether it is Homer or Malory 
or Morris who narrates them. They can no 
longer give interest : they can only receive it 



PARADISE LOST 155 

from such intrinsic interest as may belong to 
the combatants. 

So far Milton had some justification for 
preferring his own subject to those of Homer 
and Virgil. But, so far as we can judge, he 
was entirely unconscious of its disadvantages : 
as well of those which it shares with the Iliad 
and Mneid as of those peculiar to itself. Of 
the former, the most conspicuous is that 
inevitably involved in the introduction of 
divine persons into the action. Everybody 
feels that Homer's gods constantly spoil the 
interest and probability of his story, while 
very rarely enhancing its dignity. One never 
understands why they can do so much, and 
yet do no more, to affect the action. Their 
interference is always irritating, generally 
immoral, and on the whole ineffective. " Their 
omnipotence is occasional and irrational : they 
are limited in the use of it by each other, 
and all alike, even Zeus, are limited by a 
shadowy Law or Fate in the background. 
Their interventions only make the struggle 
seem unfair or unreal, and we are glad to be 
rid of them. 

Milton is still more deeply involved in the 
same difficulty. All his personages except 
two are superhuman. It is his great dis- 
advantage as compared with Dante that the 



156 MILTON 

main lines of his story are all scriptural and 
therefore outside the influence of his invention, 
that his actors are divine, angelic, or sinless 
beings, and therefore such as can provide little 
of the uncertainty of issue or variety of temper 
and experience which are the stuff of drama. 
He is hampered by having constantly to 
assert the true free will and responsibility 
of Satan for his rebellion and of Adam for his 
disobedience, even to the extent of putting 
argumentative soliloquies confessing it into 
their own mouths. So far he succeeds : both 
are felt to be free in their fatal choice. But 
the war in heaven can arouse no interest 
because its issue is obviously foregone, and 
much of the action of the rebel angels neces- 
sarily conflicts with the frequent statements 
that they can do nothing except as permitted 
by their Conqueror. At one moment they 
know their powerlessness, at another they 
hope for revenge and victory. These are 
grave difficulties which deprive large parts of 
the poem of that illusion of probability or 
truth without which poetry cannot do its 
proper work. A further difficulty, from which 
ancient poets were free, arises from the purely 
intellectual and spiritual nature of the Chris- 
tian God. It is as if Homer had had to deal 
with the divine unity of Plato instead of 



PARADISE LOST 157 

with his family of loving, quarrelling, fighting 
gods and goddesses. A being who is Incom- 
prehensible as well as Almighty and Omnis- 
cient can hardly be an actor in a poem written 
for human readers. The gods in the Iliad 
shock us because they are too like ourselves : 
Milton's God may sometimes shock us too % 
but He is more often in danger of fatiguing 
us by His utter remoteness from our experience, 
by His dwelling not merely, not indeed so 
often as we could wish, in clouds and darkness, 
but in a world of theological mysteries which 
necessarily lose more in sublimity than they 
gain in clearness by being perpetually dis- 
cussed and explained. Dante's poem is at 
least as full as Milton's of obscure theological 
doctrines and attempts at their explanation ; 
but, either by virtue of the plan of the Divina 
Commedia or by some finer instinct of reserve 
and reverence in the poet, we never find our- 
selves in Dante as we do in Milton exercising 
our critical faculties, whether we will or no, on 
the very words of God Himself. If we reject 
an argument as unconvincing or fallacious, it 
is on Virgil or Statins, Beatrice or Thomas 
Aquinas, that we sit in judgment. The Divine 
Mind, intensely and constantly felt as its 
presence is from the first canto of the poem to 
the last, is yet felt always as from behind a 



158 MILTON 

curtain which can never be raised for the sight 
of mortal eyes. 

Still, it must be admitted that, impossible 
as was the task of making the Infinite and 
Eternal an actor and speaker in a human poem, 
Milton's very failure in it is sublime. His 
prodigious powers are nowhere more wonder- 
fully displayed than in trying to do what no 
one, not even himself, could do. The second 
half of his third book, for instance, is far 
more interesting than the first, but it may 
well be doubted whether the mere fact of his 
accomplishing the first at all is not a greater 
proof of his poetic genius. Nowhere does 
that unfailing certainty of style, in which he 
has scarcely an equal among the poets of the 
whole world, stand him in such astonishing 
stead as in these difficult dialogues in heaven. 

" Father, thy word is passed, Man shall find 

grace ; 
And shall Grace not find means, that finds 

her way, 
The speediest of thy winged messengers. 
To visit all thy creatures, and to all 
Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought ? 
Happy for Man, so coming ; " 

On the side of invention there is nothing 
remarkable; but, on the side of art, what a 



PARADISE LOST 159 

divine graciousness there is in its tone and 
manner; what incomparable skill in the 
management of the verse ! Note the quiet 
monosyllabic beginning, taking note, as it were, 
of the decree of mercy, and then the expansion 
of it, the loving voice pressing forward in 
freer movement as it confidently proclaims 
the happy results that cannot fail to follow. 
And observe the peculiarly Miltonic inter- 
lacing of the whole, line leading to line and 
word to word : the " grace " of the first line 
giving the key to the " grace " of the second, 
the repeated " find " of the second line and 
the repeated " all " of the fourth, the " comes " 
of the fifth line leading on to the " coming " of 
the sixth. To make a list of such details as 
these is not to explain the effect which they 
produce ; that is the secret of Milton's genius. 
So is that cunning variety in the rhythm of 
the verses : three pauses in the first line, two 
in the second, only one in the third : the 
principal pause after the sixth syllable in 
both the first two lines, and yet the words and 
their accents so artfully varied that not the 
slightest monotony is felt ; the suggestion of 
easy flight in the smooth unbroken movement 
of the third line — 

" The speediest of thy winged messengers." 



160 MILTON 

Milton knew that an utterance of this kind, 
in which the Bible had anticipated him a 
hundred times, admitted of no novelty in 
itself : and his reverence forbade him to give 
his invention free rein in these high matters. 
But what he could do he did. The matter 
of the speech he leaves as he found it ; what 
the Son says every reader has heard before : 
but after this manner he has not heard it. 
In passing through Milton's hands all has been 
transformed into a new birth by the con- 
summate craftsmanship of a supreme artist. 

Thus the poet escapes, as far as it was 
possible to escape, from the difficulties created 
for him by his acceptance of divine Persons 
as actors in his drama. But the escape could 
only be partial. It is true that as Johnson 
says, " whatever be done the poet is always 
great " : but greatness of style often struggles 
in vain against the incongruity of a verbose 
and argumentative Deity. Such gods as 
VirgiPs Venus and Juno may hurl rhetorical 
speeches at each other without much ill 
effect, but we feel that it was a lack of the 
sense of mystery in Milton that kept him 
from realizing that the one God, Creator, 
Father and Judge of all, cannot with fitness 
debate or argue : He can only decree. " Let 
thy words be few " ; that is even truer, we 



PARADISE LOST 161 

instinctively feel, of words put into His mouth 
than of words addressed to Him. Milton's 
God suffers even more than Shakspeare's 
Ghosts from a garrulity which destroys the 
sense of the awe properly belonging to a super- 
natural being; and the grim laughter of the 
Miltonic heaven is in its different way even 
more fatal to that awe than the Jack-in-the- 
box appearances and disappearances of the 
dead Hamlet and Banquo. 

Such are some of the difficulties, in part 
overcome by the poet and in part unperceived, 
inherent in the subject of Paradise Lost One 
more, the greatest of all, remains. Poetry 
is a human art and its subject is human life. 
In the story Milton set himself to tell there 
are only two human figures; and how can 
they, hving as they do in isolated perfection 
and sinlessness, without children or friends, 
without learning or art or business, without 
hopes or fears or memories, without the ex- 
perience of disease or the expectation of death, 
and therefore without the joy, as we know it, 
of life and health, how can they provide 
material for a poem that can interest beings so 
utterly unlike them as ourselves ? The answer 
is twofold. It is partly that they do fail to 
provide that material. The Paradise Lost 
has in fact far less of ordinary human life in 



162 MILTON 

it, far less variety of action, than the Iliad 
and Odyssey, This was probably unavoidable 
but it was probably also Milton's deliberate 
intention. It was not his nature to care much 
about the small doings of ordinary people in 
everyday life. The line which he most often 
repeats in Paradise Lost is the very opposite 
of those which are repeated so often in the 
Iliad, verses of no noticeable poetic quality, 
just doing their plain duty of linking two 
speeches or two paragraphs together : such 
as — 

cog ol jusv xoiavra ngog allrilovQ dyoQSvov. 

What Milton chooses for repetition is, on the 
other hand, one of his stateliest lines, the 
magnificent — 

" Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, 
Powers." 

The choice is characteristic of the man. His 
" natural port," as Johnson well said, " is 
gigantic loftiness," and his end to " raise the 
thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures." 
So it may well be that this disadvantage 
of his subject did not weigh with him as 
much as it would have done with most poets. 
But he was not altogether blind to it, and 
the amazing skill he shows in partly getting 
over it is the other half of the answer to 



PARADISE LOST 163 

the question asked just now. His action up 
to the moment of the Fall is the inhuman 
one of a few days in hell, heaven, and a 
small sinless spot of earth : and the Fall does 
not increase the number of actors. Yet into 
the mouths of this tiny group of persons 
Milton may be said to have brought all the 
history of the world and all its geography, 
art, science and learning, the Jew, the Chris- 
tian and the Pagan, Greek philosophy and 
Roman politics, classical myth, mediaeval 
romance, and even the contemporary life of 
his own experience. This is partly done, as 
Virgil had done it, by the way of a prophecy 
of future ages : but to a much greater extent 
by the way of similes which are more elaborate 
and learned in Milton than in any poet. By 
their assistance he gives rest to the imagination 
exhausted by the sublimity of heaven and hell, 
bringing it home to its own familiar earth, 
to scenes whose charm, unlike that of Eden 
or Pandemonium, lies not in the wonder their 
strangeness excites but in the old habits, ex- 
periences and memories which they recall. So, 
after the strain of the great debate with which 
the second book opens, he soothes us with the 
beautiful simile of the evening after storm — 

" Thus they their doubtful consultations dark 
Ended, rejoicing in their matchless Chief ; 



164 MILTON 

As, when from mountain-tops the dusky 
clouds 

Ascending, while the North-wind sleeps, 
o'erspread 

Heaven's cheerful face, the louring ele- 
ment 

Scowls o'er the darkened landskip snow 
or shower. 

If chance the radiant sun, with farewell 
sweet. 

Extend his evening beam, the fields revive, 

The birds their notes renew, and bleating 
herds 

Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings." 

Note how large and general it is. Its 
method is the classical appeal to universal 
knowledge and feeling, not the romantic 
method of strangeness of sentiment and 
detailed particularity of truth. Matthew 
Arnold once recommended those who cannot 
read Greek or Latin to read Milton as a far 
better key than any translation can be to the 
secret of the greatness of the ancient poets. 
This is the truth : and not only for the reason 
on which Arnold laid just stress — ^the " sure 
and flawless perfection of rhythm and diction " 
in which, as he truly says, Milton is unique 
among English poets : but also for his classi- 
cal habit of mind, for his central sanity, for 
the sureness with which he makes his call on 
the thoughts and emotions, not of eccentric 



PARADISE LOST 165 

or exceptional individuals, but of the men and 
women of all times and all nations. 

Yet he can use his similes, as we said, to 
introduce the life of his own day and still 
generally carry his classical manner with him. 
So in the following simile he begins with the 
Homeric wolf and ends with the Roman and 
Laudian clergy. Satan has leapt over the 
wall of Paradise : and the simile begins — 

" As when a prowling wolf, 
Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for 

prey. 
Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at 

eve 
In hurdled cotes amid the field secure. 
Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the fold : 
Or as a thief bent to unhoard the cash 
Of some rich burgher, whose substantial doors, 
Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault. 
In at the window climbs, or o'er the tiles : 
So clomb this first grand Thief into God's 

fold: 
So since into his Church lewd hirelings climb." 

The last line smacks perhaps more of the 
angry pamphleteer than fits with classical 
sanity : but how admirably the London 
citizen's house gives vivid reality to the beau- 
tiful remoteness of the wolf which English 
shepherds had long forgotten to fear; how 
the recollection, present to every reader's 



166 MILTON 

mind, of that very same simile in the Gospel 
of St. John, prepares the way for its religious 
application here : how the attention is seized 
by that magnificent line of arresting mono- 
syllables, each heavy with the sense of fate — 

" So clomb this first grand Thief into God's 
fold ! " 

It used to be said that Milton uses mono- 
syllables to express slowness of action. But 
that is notably not the case here. And in 
the main it seems that he uses them, as 
Shakspeare often did, for expressing the 
solemnity of grave crisis, or for deep emotion, 
when anything fanciful, ornate or verbose 
would be fatal to the simplicity, akin to 
silence, which all men find fitting at great 
moments. So Shakspeare makes Kent say at 
Lear's death — 

" Vex not his ghost ; O let him pass 1 he hates 
him 
That would upon the rack of this tough 

world 
Stretch him out longer." 

And so Milton uses these tremendous mono- 
syllables, like a bell tolling into the silence of 
midnight, to force our attention on the doom 
of all the world that took its beginning when 
Satan entered Paradise — 



PARADISE LOST 167 

" So clomb this first grand Thief into God's 
fold." 

So again, with less solemnity as befitting a 
less awful person but still with arresting and 
delaying emphasis, he records the actual 
eating of the fatal apple— 

" she plucked, she eat : 
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her 

seat, 
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of 

woe. 
That all was lost." 

So he suspends the flow of the richest and 
most elaborate of his similes by the slow- 
moving monosyllables of 

" which cost Ceres all that pain 
To seek her through the world : " 

So he strikes the deepest note, beyond all 
politics, of his debate in hell : 

"And that must end us; that must be our 
cure — 
To be no more : " 

So again he closes the first Act of Paradise 
Regained with a verse of solitary awe — 

" And now wild beasts come forth the woods 
to roam." 



168 MILTON 

But to return to the similes. Milton uses 
them, as we have seen, to introduce things 
familiar and contemporary into the remote 
and majestic theme of his poem. But he 
also uses them to introduce the whole world 
into Eden, all later history into the beginning 
of the world, all the varied glories of art and 
war, poetry and legend, with which his 
memory was stored, into an action which 
was only partly human and provided no 
scope at all for any human activities except 
of the most primitive order. So the palace 
of Hell is, he tells us, something far beyond 
the magnificence of " Babylon, or great 
Alcairo " ; and the army of rebel angels far 
exceeds those 

*' That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each 
side 
Mixed with auxiliar gods; and what re- 
sounds 
In fable or romance of Uther's son, 
. Begirt with British and Armoric knights ; 
And all who since, baptized or infidel, 
Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, 
Damasco, or Marocco^ or Trebisond, 
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore, 
When Charlemain with all his peerage fell 
By Fontarabbia." 

So, in another of his returns to those tales 
and fancies of the Middle Age which, in spite 



PARADISE LOST 169 

of his intellectual and moral rejection of their 
falsity, yet always moved him to unusual 
beauty of verse, he compares the dwarfed 
rebels of Hell to the 

" faery elves, 
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side 
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, 
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the 

Moon 
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the Earth 
Wheels her pale course; they, on their 

mirth and dance 
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear ; 
At once with joy and fear his heart 

rebounds." 

So Eve at her gardening recalls Pales, or 
Pomona or 

" Ceres in her prime. 
Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove." 

And so, in an earlier book, the beauty of 
Paradise itself, too great to be directly told, 
is, like the splendour of Pandemonium, con- 
veyed to us by the most perfect of those 
negative similes which, forced upon Milton 
by the narrow bounds of his story, are perhaps 
the most distinctive of all the glories of 
Paradise Lost, It is too long to quote in full : 
but a few lines may be given : and they must 
include the first four, one of which has just 
Fa. 



170 MILTON 

been quoted, verses of such amazing beauty 
that, if Milton could be represented by four 
lines, these might well be the chosen four — 

" Not that fair field 
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers, 
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis 
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain 
To seek her through the world ; nor that sweet 

grove 
Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired 
Castalian spring, might with this Paradise 
Of Eden strive." 

But it is time to leave Milton's similes, 
though similes play a more important part in 
Paradise Lost than in any other epic. In- 
deed their necessary absence is a great element 
in the comparative dulness of the books given 
over to the discourses of Raphael and Michael. 
A single chapter in a little book of this kind 
can only deal with one or two aspects of so 
great a subject as Paradise Lost That being 
so, it is best, perhaps, to touch on points in 
which Milton stands pre-eminent or unique. 
The similes are one of these. Another is the 
splendour of the Miltonic speeches. It is one 
of the defects of Paradise Lost that its actors 
are seldom soldiers whom all the ages agree 
to admire, and often theologians whom all 
fear or dislike, or politicians whom all obey 



PARADISE LOST 171 

and despise. Yet how magnificently Milton 
turns this weakness into a strength ! His 
speeches have not the eternal humanity of 
Homer's : but as oratory, above all as de- 
bating oratory, they have no poetic rivals 
outside the drama. The poet who had lived 
through the Long Parliament and the trial 
of Strafford knew the art of speech as Homer 
could not know it. It may seem strange to 
us that the political struggle of his day 
affected him so much more than the military ; 
but the fact is so. Pym and Hampden are 
felt in Paradise Lost far more than Fairfax 
or Cromwell. The speeches of the second 
book could only have been written by the 
citizen of a free state who had lived through 
a crisis in its fortunes. Other speeches in 
the poem — that incomparable one of Eve to 
Adam in the fourth book, " Sweet is the 
breath of morn," those that pass between 
Eve and Adam after the Fall and Adam's 
Job-like lament in the tenth book — have a 
purer human beauty about them : but of 
the oratory of debate no poem in the world 
provides a more magnificent display than the 
second book of Paradise Lost The debate is 
a real debate. The opening of Moloch, " My 
sentence is for open war," would be instantly 
effective in any Parliament in the world. It 



172 MILTON 

rouses attention by its directness, it compels 
adherence as only courage can. To undo its 
effect Belial has to employ the most subtle 
of all oratorical arts, that of accepting the 
arguments which he dare not directly combat 
and then gradually turning them to the con- 
fusion of their author. So he and Mammon 
bring the assembly completely round to the 
mood of ease and acquiescence. Then follows 
the tremendous figure of Beelzebub, an aged 
Chatham or Gladstone, who 

" in his rising seemed 
A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven 
Deliberation sat and public care; 
And princely counsel in his face^yet shone. 
Majestic though in ruin. Sage he stood, 
With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear 
The weight of mightiest monarchies ; his look 
Drew audience and attention still as night. 
Or summer's noon-tide air." 

Yet Milton's consciousness of the situation as 
it really would be is such that Beelzebub does 
not dare to revive Moloch's defeated policy 
of war. To talk of fighting to cowed rebels 
who have just been taught the too pleasant 
lesson of the folly of further resistance would 
have been useless. So he begins by telling 
them that the ease promised to them is a 
delusion : they may submit, but submission 



PARADISE LOST 173 

will never win them peace, or deliver them 
from their victorious enemy. Peace, then, 
they cannot have ; and must have war : 
but it need not be open or dangerous : craft 
has its weapons as well as force : " what if 
we find Some easier enterprise " than the 
perilous folly of assaulting heaven? 

Such a sketch may just serve to show that 
the great debate is a living thing in which we 
feel the temper of the audience submitting 
to the successive orators and in its turn re- 
acting upon them. Another proof of the 
actuality of Milton's oratory is the way in 
which it can be quoted. 

" I give not Heaven for lost : " 

" Which, if not victory, is yet revenge : " 

** What though the field be lost? 
All is not lost ; the unconquerable will. 
And study of revenge, immortal hate. 
And courage never to submit or yield. 
And what is else not to be overcome : " 

** what peace can we return 
But, to our power, hostility and hate ? " 

" This would surpass 
Conamon revenge, and interrupt his joy 
In our confusion : " 



174 MILTON 

" Advise if this be worth 
Attempting, or to sit in darkness here 
Hatching vain empires : " 

*' What reinforcement we may gain from hope, 
If not, what resolution from despair : " 

" on whom we send 
The weight of all and our last hope relies : " 

" This enterprise 
None shall partake with me." 

All these have been or could well be hurled 
by contending Parliamentarians across the 
table of the House of Commons, often with 
a fine irony, the Miltonic magnificence em- 
phasizing the pettiness of the ordinary politi- 
cal squabbles. But, of course, the theological 
questions which are at the root of Milton's 
debate make many of the arguments inap- 
plicable to politics : indeed, what is probably 
the most remembered passage in all the 
speeches has nothing to do with social or 
political activities but draws its poignant 
interest from the secret thoughts that visit 
the hearts of men when they are most alone — 

" And that must end us ; that must be our 
cure. 
To be no more. Sad cure ! for who would 

lose, 
Though full of pain, this intellectual being. 



PARADISE LOST 175 

Those thoughts that wander through 

eternity, 
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost 
In the wide womb of uncreated Night, 
Devoid of sense and motion? " 

Here we obviously go outside the dramatic 
probabilities : it is no longer Belial who is 
speaking : it is the voice of a highly cultivated 
and intellectual human being with all Greek 
thought behind him; it is, in short, Milton 
himself. The whole poem is full of such 
autobiographical confessional passages, either 
indirect like this or open and undisguised like 
the great introductions to the first, third, 
seventh and ninth books. This constant 
intervention of the poet in his epic is one of 
the originalities of Paradise Lost, and certainly 
not the least successful. The passages which 
are due to it have been criticized as irregu- 
larities or superfluities, but, as Johnson 
justly asked, " superfluities so beautiful who 
would take away ? " Homer may be said 
never to allow us to do more than guess 
obscurely at what he himself was or 
thought or felt : so leaving room for the 
follies of the criticism which supposes him to 
be a kind of limited company of poets. Virgil 
spoke directly to his readers at least once 
in the Mneid, in the most magnificent, and 



176 MILTON 

most magnificently fulfilled, of all the poetic 
promises of eternal fame — 

" Fortunati ambo ! Si quid mea carmina 

possunt 
Nulla dies.unquam memori vos eximet sevo 
Dum domus -^nese Capitoli immobile 

saxum 
Accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habe- 

bit." 

But it is less in such a direct intervention as 
this than in the whole tone and temper of his 
poem that he reveals to us his delicate and 
beautiful nature. Milton confesses himself in 
both ways. His high seriousness, his proud 
and resolute will, his grave sadness at the 
folly of mankind, are interwoven in the whole 
of his story. Then in the speeches he will 
often, as in this of Belial, forget altogether 
who is speaking and where and when, forget 
Satan and Adam, Eden and Hell, and make 
his human escape to his own time and country 
and to himself. The extreme limitations of 
his subject made something of this kind 
almost necessary. When all had been done 
that simile and prophecy could do to bring in 
the life of men and women as Milton's readers 
knew it there still remained the difiiculty 
that Adam and his angel visitors must talk, 
and that before the Fall there was almost 



PARADISE LOST 177 

nothing for them to talk about. So they 
constantly talk as if they had all history 
behind them and the world's processes were 
to them, as to us, old and familiar things. 
" War seemed a civil game To this uproar," 
says Raphael, as if he were fresh from reading 
Livy or Gibbon and had all the wars of 
Europe and Asia in his memory. Often 
Milton calls attention, as it were, to his own 
inconsistencies, putting in an apology like 
that of Michael when he talks to Adam about 
Hamath and Hermon — 

** Things by their names I call though yet 
unnamed; " 

but more often he leaves them unexplained, 
perhaps not even noticing them himself. 
These difficulties are seen at their worst 
in the very earthly geography of heaven 
and its very unheavenly military operations : 
and, interesting as the passages are, it is 
difficult to forget the incongruity of Raphael 
and Adam discussing the Ptolemaic and 
Copernican theories of the universe, or Adam 
moralizing on the unhappiness of marriage 
as if he had studied the divorce reports or 
gone through a course of modem novels. 
Yet few and foolish are the readers who can 
dwell on dramatic improbabilities when Adam 



178 MILTON 

is pouring out the bitter cry wrung from 
Milton by the still unforgotten miseries of his 
first marriage — 

** Oh ! why did God, 
Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven 
With Spirits masculine, create at last 
This novelty on Earth, this fair defect 
Of Nature, and not fill the World at once 
With men as Angels, without feminine, 
Or find some other way to generate 
Mankind? This mischief had not then be- 
fallen. 
And more that shall befall; innumerable 
Disturbances on Earth through female snares. 
And strait conjunction with this sex. For 

either 
He never shall find out fit mate, but such 
As some misfortune brings him, or, mistake; 
Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain. 
Through her perverseness, but shall see her 

gained 
By a far worse, or, if she love, withheld 
By parents ; or his happiest choice too late 
Shall meet, already linked and wedlock- 
bound 
To a fell adversary, his hate or shame ; 
Which infinite calamity shall cause 
To human life, and household peace eon- 
found." 

It is obvious that in all this we hear the 
poet's own voice. But it is scarcely fair to 
quote it without pointing out that it must 



PARADISE LOST 179 

not be taken alone. The common notion 
that Milton's own melancholy experience had 
made him a purblind misogynist is a com- 
plete mistake. No one has praised marriage 
as he has. The chastest of poets is as little 
afraid as the Prayer Book of frank acceptance 
of the physical facts which must commonly 
be the basis of its spiritual relation. It is 
the whole union for which he stands, of body, 
mind, and spirit. He puts into the mouth 
of this same Adam the most eloquent praise 
woman ever received, culminating in 

*' All higher Knowledge in her presence falls 
Degraded. Wisdom in discourse with her 
Loses discountenanced, and like Folly shows ; 
Authority and Reason on her wait. 
As one intended first, not after made 
Occasionally : and, to consunomate all, 
Greatness of mind and nobleness their seat 
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe 
About her, as a guard angelic placed." 

It is true that the reply of the Angel 
moderating these ardours is more evidently 
Miltonic — 

" what transports thee so ? 
An outside ? fair no doubt and worthy well 
Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love ; 
Not thy subjection. Weigh with her thyself; 
Then value. Oft-times nothing profits more 
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right." 



180 MILTON 

But, though in these last words Raphael 
entirely disappears in Milton, the poet who 
could conceive the panegyric to which Raphael 
replies, who could elsewhere make his hero 
say that he received " access in every virtue " 
from the looks of Eve, had assuredly no low 
ideal of what a woman may be. Adam speaks 
for him when he praises love as 

" not the lowest end of human life ; " 

and he gives us a true corrective of the over- 
severe picture of Milton which half -knowledge 
is apt to draw when he goes on to declare 
that 

" not to irksome toil, but to delight. 
He made us, and delight to reason joined." 

But this is only one of many subjects on 
which Milton lets us hear his own voice speak- 
ing through his characters. We hear it when 
Satan cries to Beelzebub — 

" Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable, 
Doing or suffering : " 

when Raphael reports Nisroch as saying of 
pain and pleasure what may well have been 
felt by the blind poet who owed his knowledge 
of pleasure to memory only, while he knew 



PARADISE LOST 181 

pain by the frequent experience of one of the 
most painful of diseases — 

*' sense of pleasure we may well 
Spare out of life, perhaps, and not repine, 
But live content, which is the calmest life; 
But pain is perfect misery, the worst 
Of evils, and, excessive, overturns 
All patience : " 

we hear it when Adam, like a weary scholar, 
says that 

" not to know at large of things remote 
From use, obscure and subtle, but to know 
That which before us lies in daily life, 
Is the prime wisdom ; " 

when Raphael asks, like a Platonic philo- 
sopher, 

** what if Earth 
Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things 

therein 
Each to other like, more than on Earth is 

thought ? " 

when Adam, like a doubting Christian in an 
age of speculation, hesitates for a moment 
about the efficacy of prayer — 

" that from us aught should ascend to 
Heaven 
So prevalent as to concern the mind 
Of God high-blest, or to incline his will, 
Hard to belief may seem : " 



182 MILTON 

and once more when Adam cries — 

" solitude sometimes is best society," 

as if he, Hke the blind Milton, was worn out 
by twenty years of contending voices, and 
longed for the relief of silent and lonely 
thought. 

To the direct interventions of the poet 
there is less need to call attention as, of 
course, no reader can miss them. They 
are probably the most universally admired 
passages of the poem. Every reader who 
deserves to read them at all finds himself 
unable to do so without wishing to get them 
by heart. They do not rival the daring 
splendour of the scenes in hell : nor perhaps 
the suave and gracious perfection of the 
evening scene in Paradise in the fourth book ; 
nor can they, of course, exhibit the dramatic 
power of the scene that precedes and still 
more of those that follow the Fall. But 
nothing in the whole poem moves us so much. 
It is not merely that Milton has exerted his 
whole mastery of his art to make their every 
line and every word please the ear, awaken 
the memory, stimulate the imagination, lift 
the whole mental and emotional nature of 
the reader up to a height of being unknown 
to its ordinary experience. This he has 



PARADISE LOST 183 

done in some other parts of his poem. But, 
fine as some of his dramatic touches are, the 
essence of his genius was lyrical and not 
dramatic or objective at all. And so none of 
his characters, divine, diabolic or human, will 
ever move us quite as he moves us himself. 

Let us hear the most beautiful of all these 
confessions : and for once let us indulge 
ourselves with the whole. The themes that 
make up Milton's great symphony ought in 
truth always to be given unbroken, if only 
that were possible. Indeed, there is a sense 
in which it may be said that nothing less than 
the whole poem can do justice to a design 
so majestic as that of Paradise Lost. But 
in any case it is certain that no fragment of 
a few lines can convey a full impression of the 
rhythmical, intellectual, imaginative unity of 
the Miltonic paragraph or section. This is 
above all conspicuous in the great speeches 
and in the elaborate introductions that pre- 
cede the first, third, seventh and ninth books. 
Here is the greatest of the four; the most 
famous of Milton's personal interventions in 
his poem, and one of the most wonderful 
things he ever wrote. 

'* Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first- 
born! 
Or of the Eternal coeternal beam 



184 MILTON 

May I express thee unblamed ? Since God 

is light, 
And never but in unapproaehed Hght 
Dwelt from eternity ; dwelt then in thee, 
Bright effluence of bright essence increate ! 
Or hearest thou rather pure Ethereal stream, 
Whose fountain who shall tell ? Before the 

Sun, 
Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the 

voice 
Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest 
The rising World of waters dark and deep, 
Won from the void and formless Inlinite ! 
Thee I revisit now with bolder wing, 
Escaped the Stygian pool, though long 

detained 
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight, 
Through utter and through middle Darkness 

borne. 
With other notes than to the Orphean 

lyre, 
I sung of Chaos and eternal Night, 
Taught by the Heavenly Muse to venture 

down 
The dark descent, and up to re-ascend. 
Though hard and rare: thee I revisit 

safe, 
And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou 
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain 
To find thy piercing ray, and find no 

dawn; 
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their 

orbs, 
Or dim suffusion veiled. Yet not the more 
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt 



PARADISE LOST 185 

Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill, 
Smit with the love of sacred song ; but chief 
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath, 
That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling 

flow. 
Nightly I visit ; nor sometimes forget 
Those other two equalled with me in fate. 
So were I equalled with them in renown, 
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides, 
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old : 
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move 
Harmonious numbers ; as the wakeful bird 
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid, 
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the 

year 
Seasons return ; but not to me returns 
Day or the sweet approach of even or morn. 
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose. 
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine ; 
But cloud instead and ever-during dark 
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of 

men 
Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge 

fair. 
Presented with a universal blank 
Of Nature's works, to me expunged and 

rased. 
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out. 
So much the rather thou. Celestial Light, 
Shine inward, and the mind through all her 

powers 
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from 

thence 
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell 
Of things invisible to mortal sight." 



186 MILTON 

Not all the poetry of all the world can pro- 
duce more than a few passages that equal this 
in moving power. Tears are not very far 
from the eye that is passing over its page : 
tears in which sympathy plays a smaller part 
than joy at the discovery that human words 
can be so beautiful. But if Milton moves us 
more by his own personality than by that of 
any of his creations, it is still true that he is 
not so entirely without dramatic power as 
has sometimes been alleged. No one would 
claim for him that he was one of the great 
narrative or dramatic masters. But his weak- 
ness on these sides is so obvious that there has 
been a tendency to exaggerate it. We notice 
the undramatic speeches of Satan and Adam : 
we notice such things as Eve's dream in the 
fifth book which, anticipating, as it does, so 
many of the details of her temptation, renders 
her fall much less probable, and goes far to 
destroy its interest when it occurs. But we 
are slower to notice the admirable dramatic 
management of such a scene as that between 
Eve and the Serpent in the ninth book. And 
yet how finely imagined it is, in all its suc- 
cessive stages ! Satan, at first " stupidly 
good," overawed at Eve's beauty and inno- 
cence; then, recovering his natural malice, 
and beginning his attempt by appealing to 



PARADISE LOST 187 

two things, curiosity and the love of flattery, 
which have always been supposed especially 
powerful with women; and Eve, taking no 
direct notice of his compliments and in 
appearance surrendering only to the other 
bait of novelty and surprise ; " how cam'st 
thou speakable of mute?" So the scene 
begins. Flattery has ensured the tempter 
a favourable reception; curiosity gives him 
the chance of an apparently telling argument. 
I ate, he says, of the fruit of a certain tree and 
received from it speech and reason. But I 
have found nothing to satisfy my new-won 
powers till I saw thee, whom I now desire to 
worship as the sovran of creation. She 
affects to rebuke the flattery, but naturally 
asks to be shown the tree on which the 
wonderful fruit grows. It of course turns out 
to be the Forbidden Tree : and Eve mentions 
the prohibition as a thing final and un- 
questionable. He meets her refusal by giving 
a sinister and plausible explanation of the 
prohibition. Why did God forbid her the 
fruit? "Why, but to keep ye low and 
ignorant, His worshippers ? ' ' God, he suggests, 
knows too well that as the fruit had raised 
the serpent from brute to human, so it would 
raise the woman from human to divine. 
Noon and hunger come to fortify his argu- 



188 MILTON 

ments ; and, after a speech in which she adds 
one more of her own drawn from the name, 
the Tree of Knowledge, given to the tree by 
God Himself, she plucks and eats. In the 
first ecstasy of pleasure she luxuriates in 
joy and self-confidence. Then she considers 
whether she shall use her new powers to make 
herself the equal and even the superior of 
Adam. The prospect tempts her : but she 
is not quite free from fear that the threatened 
punishment of death may after all descend 
upon her. And that suggests the picture of 
" Adam wedded to another Eve," which 
brings her swiftly to the decision that Adam 
shall share with her her fate, whichever it be, 
bliss or woe. In this, as later in her hasty 
proposal of suicide. Eve is a living and con- 
vincing human figure. To the stronger and 
wiser Adam it was harder to give life. But 
what could be finer or truer than his instant 
repudiation of her plausible tale — 

" How art thou lost ! how on a sudden lost. 
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death 
devote ! " 

followed by his immediate resolution to die 
with her — 

" And me with thee hath ruined : for with thee 
Certain my resolution is to die. 
How can I live without thee ? " 



PARADISE LOST 189 

The rest follows with equal probability. 
Once resolved to unite his lot with hers, he 
soon finds arguments to prove that that lot 
is not likely after all to be so dreadful. Having 
talked himself into the surrender of his judg- 
ment he eats, and having eaten he goes at 
once all lengths of extravagance, folly and 
sin. Then comes the reaction and the in- 
evitable mutual reproaches; with the fine 
natural touch of Eve upbraiding Adam for his 
weakness in yielding to her request and 
granting her the freedom which had proved 
so fatal. So the ninth book closes. When 
the story is resumed in the second half of the 
tenth book we get the tremendous lamenta- 
tion of Adam, so strangely undramatic in its 
argumentative justification of his own punish- 
ment, so full of true drama as well as of 
magnificent lyrical power in its cry of human 
misery and despair. Then follows the bitter 
attack upon Eve, as the cause of all his woe : 
and the whole scene is concluded by her 
humble and beautiful submission — 

" While yet we live, scarce one short hour 
perhaps. 
Between us two let there be peace : " 

by their reconciliation, and by their quiet and 
resigned acceptance of their common fate. 



190 MILTON 

It was perhaps worth while to go through 
one act of Milton's drama in this detail to 
give some idea of the skill which he has shown 
in working up a few verses- of Genesis into an 
elaborate story. But no detail, no fragmentary 
notes of any kind, even when they deal with 
matters in which Milton was far stronger than 
he was on the side of narrative or drama, can 
do much to exhibit the greatness of Paradise 
Lost. For that there is only one way, to read it. 
And, as we said just now, to read the whole. 
It is true that you cannot read it for the in- 
terest of the story as you can all the Odyssey, 
much of the Iliad and some of the Mneid : but 
the poem is still a whole and you need the 
whole to judge and understand it. And even 
the weaker books, the fifth, the seventh and 
twelfth, contain episodes, like the scene between 
Abdiel and Satan and the incomparable con- 
clusion of the whole poem, which are among 
the last a wise reader would wish to miss. 
Moreover, where the story is dullest it has 
things which give, perhaps, the most astonish- 
ing proof of Milton's power of style. It is 
true that he does himself occasionally fall 
into the empty pomposity which characterized 
his eighteenth-century imitators who fancied 
that big words could turn prose into poetry. 
So he talks of dried fruits as " what by frugal 



PARADISE LOST 191 

storing firmness gains To nourish, and super- 
fluous moist consumes." But the thing most 
remarkable about this is its extreme rarity. 
Taking the poem as a whole, the mighty music 
scarcely ceases : the majestic flight of the poet 
continues uninterrupted : no contrary winds 
disturb it, no weariness brings it flagging 
down to earth. There is nothing, not even 
theological disputes, out of which he cannot 
make fine verse, and occasionally great 
poetry. There is nothing, however great, 
that he cannot make his own. Just as 
Shakspeare took the noble prose of North's 
Plutarch, and hardly altering a word made 
noble poetry of it, so Milton can take the 
Bible. " For now," says Job, " I should 
have lain still and been quiet, I should have 
slept : then had I been at rest." North could 
not rise to the height of this. But even this 
Milton will dare to lay his hand upon : and, 
if even he cannot lift it any higher, only he 
could have touched it at all without desecra- 
tion. " How glad," says Adam — 

" how glad would lay me down 
As in my mother's lap ! There I should rest, 
And sleep secure." 

Or take a passage like that of the Son of God 
clothing Adam and Eve after the Fall, where 



192 MILTON 

many Biblical suggestions are gathered to- 
gether — 

" As when he washed his servants' feet, so 

now 
As father of his family he clad 
Their nakedness with skins of beasts, or 

slain. 
Or, as the snake, with youthful coat repaid ; 
And thought not much to clothe his 



The full appreciation of a passage like this, 
so very simple, so apparently obvious, yet so 
entirely in the grand style which, whether 
his subject stoops or soars, very rarely fails 
Milton, is not a thing of one reading or of two. 
Milton, the greatest artist of our language, 
is naturally the most conspicuous instance 
of the law which applies to all great art. 
Only natures as rarely endowed with the 
receptive gift as he was himself with the 
creative can fully appreciate his work at 
the first reading. Like all great works of the 
imagination it has generally to train, some- 
times almost to create, the faculties which 
are to appreciate it aright. This is particu- 
larly true in the case of classical art, where 
the emotional appeal, though just as real, is 
much less apparent because it is so much 
more controlled by intellectual sanity. Gothic 



PARADISE LOST 193 

and Romantic art are commonly far more 
instantaneous in the impression they make, 
perhaps because, according to the ingenious 
suggestion of the Poet Laureate, they admit 
at once of more daring flights of the imagina- 
tion and of stronger reahsm than classical 
art can bear. But it may well be doubted 
whether the wonder and delight which every 
man of the most modest aesthetic capacity 
owes to them can in the end keep pace with 
the slower growing appreciation of the uni- 
versality and sanity of classical work. But 
this is an old dispute not likely to be settled 
this year or next. Nor does it affect the fact 
that all great work, even Romantic or Gothic, 
gains by time in proportion to its greatness. 
It is the only absolutely certain test of great- 
ness in art. The instantly popular tune is 
unendurable in six months, the instantly 
popular novel or poem is totally forgotten 
in a year or two. No one perceives the whole 
greatness of St. Paul's Cathedral, or Sanso- 
vino's Library at Venice, or the music of Bach, 
or the poetry of Milton, at the first sight or 
hearing. No competent eye, ear or mind 
fails to perceive more and more of it at each 
renewed experience. Whatever be the art, 
a picture, a piece of sculpture, a book, the 
test is the same : the cheap, the sentimental, 

G 



194 MILTON 

the sensational, the merely pretty, lose some- 
thing, be it little or much, at each renewal of 
acquaintance : the great work steadily gains. 
To this test Paradise Lost can fearlessly 
appeal. It is not meant for idle hours or 
empty people. It is not amusing in the lower 
sense of the word. It is not as exciting as it 
might well have been. It is probably true 
that, as Johnson said with his usual honesty, 
" No one ever wished it longer than it is " : 
yet there is equal truth in another remark of 
his, " I cannot wish Milton's work other than 
it is," and in the implied answer to his bold 
question, " What other author ever soared so 
high or sustained his flight so long? " The 
difficulty for Milton's readers is that they do 
not easily soar, and still less easily sustain 
their soaring. The great gifts which Johnson 
brought to the criticism of literature lay far 
more in common sense and in a profound 
insight into human life than in any real turn 
for poetry. Of that nearly every one who 
to-day gives much time to reading poetry will 
probably have as much as he. Such people 
are sometimes mistakenly content with a single 
reading of Paradise Lost They remember 
a few of its glories and the rest of the 
poem they acquiesce in forgetting. Let them 
put it to the test to which lovers of music 



PARADISE LOST 195 

put the Symphonies of Beethoven and lovers 
of sculpture the remains of the Parthenon 
and the temple of the Ephesian Artemis. 
Let them give the little time required to read 
it through every year, or every second year. 
They will find more in it the second time than 
they did the first, and much more the fifth or 
the tenth time. It will issue triumphantly 
from, the trial : and before they reach middle 
age they will know by their own personal 
experience, what the best authorities have 
always told them, that this is one of those 
rare works of human genius whose power 
and beauty may in sober truth be called 
inexhaustible. 



CHAPTER V 

PARADISE REGAINED AND SAMSON 
AGONISTES 

Paradise Regained, like the Odyssey , the 
Mneid and the second part of Faust, has been 
an inevitable victim of the human taste for 
comparison. It cannot fail to be compared 
with Paradise Lost and cannot fail to suffer 
by it. The poets and critics have indeed 
been kinder to it than the public. Johnson 
said that if it had not been written by Milton 
" it would receive universal praise." Words- 
worth thought it " the most perfect in execu- 
tion of anything written by Milton." But 
the great body of readers finds an epic with 
only two main actors in it, and hardly any- 
thing that can be called a story, too severe 
a demand upon its poetic taste. And when 
unprofessional opinion remains constant for 
several generations, as it has in this case, it 
is never wise to ignore or defy it. Paradise 
Regained is a very bare poem. It has none 
of the splendours of its predecessor : no 
X96 



PARADISE REGAINED 197 

scenes in which we hear the full voice of 
that Milton 

" Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, 
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, 
Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean 
Rings to the roar of an angel onset ; " 

nor yet any of those others which delighted 
Tennyson even more, the scenes of Adam's 

"bowery loneliness, 
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring. 
And bloom profuse and cedar arches." 

It has no love, no sin, no quarrel, no 
reconciliation, no central moment of tragic 
suspense, indeed no human action at all. And 
Milton has refrained almost absolutely from 
adorning it with the similes which are among 
the chief glories of Paradise Lost. It is, in 
fact, as Mark Pattison has said, " probably 
the most unadorned poem extant in any 
language." 

At the very beginning of Paradise Lost 
Milton had cast his eye on to that second 
chapter in^^the Christian history of man with- 
out which the first is a mere picture of despair. 
His subject was to be man's first disobedience 
and its results ; death, woe and loss of Eden 

" till one greater Man 
Restore us and regain the blissful seat." 



198 MILTON 

Whether he then had any thought of 
attempting to deal with that restoration we 
do not know. Nor do we know what motives 
induced him to choose the story of the 
Temptation in the Wilderness as the action 
in which the new order of things was to be 
manifested. Some critics have been sur- 
prised that he did not take the Crucifixion or 
the Resurrection. And it is obvious that the 
first, with the Tree of Calvary pointing back 
to the Tree in the Garden, would have afforded 
a natural sequence to Paradise Lost. Others 
have wondered that he did not use the 
Descent into Hell in which the liberation of 
Satan's captives would have followed on the 
story of how they fell into his power. And 
it is obvious that there were great poetic, and 
especially Miltonic, possibilities in the theme 
of the victorious Son of God entering the 
very kingdom in which the Satan of Paradise 
Lost had exercised such splendid rule, and 
setting free the saints and prophets and kings 
of the Old Testament. But it is possible, as 
Sir Walter Raleigh has suggested, that Milton 
was no longer in the vein for grandiose themes 
of external majesty and might such as this 
story would have afforded. " His interest 
was now centred rather in the sayings of the 
wise than in the deeds of the mighty." That 



PARADISE REGAINED 199 

may be so : though his Samson which was yet 
to come is certainly not without its mighty 
deeds. But, whatever were his reasons for 
putting aside such subjects as the Descent 
into Hell, it is not difficult to discover several 
which he probably found decisive in inducing 
him to prefer the Temptation to the Passion. 
To begin with, he must have been conscious 
of the immensely greater difficulty of handling 
the story of the Passion in such a way that 
Christian readers could bear to read it. Then, 
even more certainly operative on his mind 
was the fact that the Passion is related to us 
in great detail, the Temptation in a few words 
of mysterious import; so that the one leaves 
almost no freedom of invention to the poet, 
while the other scarcely binds him at all. 
Then again there is the close parallelism be- 
tween the temptation in the Garden and the 
temptation in the Wilderness; and finally, 
most important of all, the fact that the Tempta- 
tion is the only event in the life of Christ in 
which Satan plays a visible and important 
part. A poem that was to be a second 
part oi ^Paradise Lost could not do without 
Satan ; and in fact he is even more prominent 
in Paradise Regained, where he is present 
throughout, than in its predecessor of which 
there are several books which scarcely so 



200 MILTON 

much as mention him. This was no doubt 
decisive. 

So Milton chose the Temptation in the 
Wilderness as his subject, with Satan once 
more as one of the two principal actors in 
his story. But the actor is even more changed 
than the story. The Satan of the later poem 
is no longer the splendid rebel of Paradise 
Lost Paradise Regained has in it no heavenly 
battles and its council of devils is a mere 
shadow of the great parliament of hell. It 
has, therefore, no place either for the general 
of the infernal armies or for the Prime Minister 
of the infernal Senate. The magnificent figure 
who imposes himself on the imagination — 

" Like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved " — 

becomes in it something far less impressive, 
a political theorist instead of a statesman, a 
student of the balance of power instead of a 
soldier, a casuistical disputant about culture 
and morals in place of a devil venturing all 
for empire and revenge. It is as if Alexander 
were exchanged for Aristotle : almost as if 
St. George were replaced by Mr. Worldly 
Wiseman. The imagination is affected by 
the inevitable loss of colour, and Paradise 
Regained is the sufferer in fame and popularity. 
It also suffers from the old difficulty in- 



PARADISE REGAINED 201 

herent in supernatural personages which 
affects it even more than Paradise Lost, 
The whole action is a succession of Tempta- 
tions. The question how far such attempts 
by a devil upon a Divine Being can afford 
any hope to the one or any fear or danger to 
the other is a mystery of which the Church 
itself scarcely claims to offer a full explana- 
tion. Into the theological difficulty this is 
not the place to enter. It is only with the 
corresponding poetic difficulty which we are 
concerned. Just as in Paradise Lost it is 
impossible not to feel the unreality of the 
war in heaven, so in Paradise Regained it is 
impossible not to feel, in spite of some incon- 
sistency of language on the subject, that 
Satan commonly knows who it is whom he 
is assailing and is known by Him in return, 
and that consequently the whole action has 
for poetic purposes a certain unreality. He 
knows that Jesus is the Son of God; with a 
right to the homage of all nature and the 
power to take all as His own. He asks — • 

" Hast thou not right to all created things ? 
Owe not all creatures, by just right, to thee 
service ? " 

Yet he discusses with Him various very 
human methods of arriving at power, just as 

G2 



202 MILTON 

if He were subject to the same conditions as 
other men who desire to rule or influence the 
world. The consequence is that, although 
the speeches contain much interesting thought 
and much fine poetry, they are seldom or 
never dramatically convincing. Our Lord, in 
particular, instead of the gracious and winning 
figure of the Gospels, becomes a kind of self- 
sufficient aristocratic moralist. His speeches, 
as Milton gives them, display rather the defiant 
virtue of the Stoic, or the self-conscious 
righteousness of the Pharisee, than the simple 
and loving charity of the Christian. The 
weapon of moral and intellectual contempt, 
so freely employed in them and so natural 
both to Jew and to Greek, strikes to us a 
false and jarring note when put into the 
mouth of Him who taught His disciples that 
the only way of entry into His kingdom was 
that of being born again and becoming as 
little children. 

These are all serious drawbacks and they 
are not the only ones. If from' one point of 
view Milton in Paradise Regained is too little 
of a Christian, from another he is too much. 
One of the gravest difficulties with which 
Christian apologists have always had to con- 
tend is the entire indifference of the New 
Testament and, generally speaking, of the 



PARADISE REGAINED 203 

Church in all ages, especially the most devout, 
not only to economic and material progress, 
but to all elements except the ethical and 
spiritual in the higher civilization of humanity. 
At its friendliest the Church has hardly ever 
been willing to allow to such things any in- 
herent or independent importance of their own. 
Those who feel that they owe an incalcul- 
able debt to art and poetry and philosophy 
and therefore to the Greeks, have inevitably 
found this attitude a stumbling-block. And 
they will always read with exceptional sm'prise 
and indignation the narrow obscurantism of the 
speech which Milton, scholar and artist as he 
was, is not ashamed to put into the mouth of 
Christ in the fourth book. He cannot himself 
have been a victim of the shallow fallacy ex- 
pressed in line 325 (he who reads gets little 
benefit unless he brings judgment to his 
reading "and what he brings what need he 
elsewhere seek ? ") ; and his lifelong practice 
shows that he did not think Greek poetry was 

" Thin-sown with aught of profit or delight." 

Nor could he have seriously thought that the 
Hebrew prophets taught " the solid rules of 
civil government," of which in fact they knew 
nothing except on the moral side, better than 
the statesmen and philosophers of Rome and 



204 MILTON 

Athens. The explanation is, perhaps, partly 
that Milton was an Arian, and therefore felt 
at liberty to emphasize the Jewish limita- 
tions of Christ : limitations the possibility of 
which, as recent controversies have shown, 
even Athanasian opinion has been forced 
to face. But, in any case, in the Paradise 
Regained stress is necessarily, for dramatic 
purposes, laid on the Hebrew and Messianic 
character of Christ, and from that point of 
view it is not unnatural to make Him the 
spokesman of Hebrew resistance to the in- 
tellectual encroachments of Greece and Rome. 
Another part of the explanation is that the 
strong Biblical and Hebraic element in Milton's 
character does seem to have increased in 
strength during his later years. It was far 
from getting exclusive possession even then, 
and all the evidence shows that he was always 
the very opposite of the narrow-minded 
Puritan fanatics of his day. But his tenden- 
cies in that direction would be exaggerated 
while he was occupied with a purely Biblical 
subject. And he may have thought, if he 
thought about the question at all, that the 
contemptuous tone adopted about classical 
culture in the speech of Christ was*not only 
dramatically defensible, but balanced by the 
far finer passage, evidently written from his 



PARADISE REGAINED 205 

heart, in which Satan exalts the glories of 
Athens. It is, perhaps, the most famous 
thing in the poem. 

" Look once more, ere we leave this specular 

mount, 
Westward, much nearer by south-west: 

behold 
Where on the ^Egean shore a city stands. 
Built nobly, pure the air and light the soil — 
Athens, the eye of Greece,' mother of arts 
And eloquence, native to famous wits 
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess. 
City or suburban, studious walks and shades. 
See there the olive-grove of Academe, 
Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird 
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer 

long; 
There flow'ry hill Hymettus, with the sound 
Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites 
To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls 
His whispering stream. Within the walls 

then view 
The schools of ancient sages, his who bred 
Great Alexander to subdue the world, 
Lyceum there; and painted Stoa next. 
There thou shalt hear and learn the secret 

power 
Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit 
By voice or hand, and various-measured 

verse, 
Molmii charms and Dorian lyric odes. 
And his who gave them breath, but higher 

sung, 



206 MILTON 

Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called. 
Whose poem Phoebus challenged for his own. 
Thence what the lofty grave Tragedians 

taught 
In chorus or iambic, teachers best 
Of moral prudence, with delight received 
In brief sententious precepts, while they 

treat 
Of fate, and chance, and change in human 

life. 
High actions and high passions best de- 
scribing." 

It is plainly the very voice of the poet him- 
self, and he may have felt certain that we 
should so understand it. But it is difficult 
not to regret that it is the Devil who is made 
to pay Milton's great debt to Athens and 
Christ who is made to repudiate it. 

Yet, in spite of all this, in spite of its disdain 
of the obvious attractions open to poetry, in 
spite of much in it that alienates the sym- 
pathies of many, the Paradise Regained has 
received very high praise from the finest 
judges of English poetry. Johnson and 
Wordsworth have already been quoted, and 
to them may be added Coleridge, who says 
of it that " in its kind it is the most perfect 
poem extant," and Mr. Mackail, who has 
spoken of its " unique poetic qualities." 
Why have the poets and critics been so much 



PARADISE REGAINED 207 

more favourable to it than the public ? Per- 
haps because artists are always inclined to 
value work in proportion to its difficulties. 
Indeed, this fallacy seems natural to all 
classes of men about their own work. Gar- 
deners in England tend to admire a man who 
grows indifferent oranges more than a man 
who grows good strawberries. It is like what 
Johnson said of the preaching lady : " Sir, a 
woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on 
his hinder legs. It is not done well ; but you 
are surprised to find it done at all." This 
tendency to let surprise sit in the seat which 
belongs to judgment is greatly intensified by 
professional knowledge. The architect is apt 
to exaggerate the merit of a building placed 
on a very awkward site, the artist to think a 
piece of very difficult foreshortening more 
beautiful than it really is. The public may 
not be so good a judge either of the building 
or of the drawing : but, knowing nothing of 
the technical difficulties, it at least forms its 
judgment on the true criterion which is, of 
course, the value of the product, not the 
surprisingness of its having been produced 
or the difficulties overcome in its production. 
Something of this kind may account for 
the fact that Paradise Regained has been more 
appreciated by the poets than by the public. 



208 MILTON 

The public finds it rather bare and dry and 
judges accordingly. The poets know how 
infinitely hard a task it was that Milton set 
himself, and find no praise too great for the 
man who did not fail in it. They see a poem 
of two thousand lines whose single subject is 
the attempt of a devil who knows himself 
doomed to defeat to persuade a divine 
Person who knows Himself assured of 
victory to be false to the law of His being. 
And into this barren theme they see art and 
nature, ethics and politics, luxury and splen- 
dour and empire, cunningly interwoven and 

" Eden raised in the waste Wilderness." 

They see a style stripped of almost all orna- 
ment especially in the speeches of our Lord : 
the poet deliberately walking always on the 
very edge of the gulf of prose and yet always 
as one perfectly assured that into that gulf 
his feet can never fall. Here and there, as 
when we come upon such lines as 

" I never liked thy talk, thy offers less," 

we are nervous as we watch : but the poet 
passes on his way serenely unconscious of our 
fears, and in the very next speech is on the 
heights of poetry with the great description 



PARADISE REGAINED 209 

of Athens. Once only, perhaps, in the reply 
to Satan after the storm — 

" Me worse than wet thou find'st not," 

we feel that the cunningly maintained balance 
has failed and that the limit has been passed 
which divides the severe from the grotesque. 

The truth is that, if the narrowness of its 
subject and the austerity of its style be 
admitted, Paradise Regained is a poetic 
achievement as great as it is surprising. It 
cannot be Paradise Lost, of course, and that 
is the fault for which it has not been forgiven. 
And its fine things are even less evident, much 
less evident, at a first reading than those of 
Paradise Lost, But Milton has left nothing 
more Miltonic. He did greater things but 
nothing in which he stands so entirely alone. 
There is no poem in English, perhaps none in 
any language of the world, which exliibits to 
the same degree the inherent power of style 
itself, in its naked essence, unassisted by any 
of its visible accessories. There are in it, of 
course, some passages of characteristic splen- 
dour, the banquet in the wilderness, the vision 
of Rome, and others ; but a large part of the 
poem is as bare as the mountains and, to 
the luxurious and conventional, as bleak and 
forbidding. Its grave Dorian music, scarcely 



210 MILTON 

heard by the sensual ear, is played by the 
mind to the spirit and by the spirit to the 
mind. Ever present as its art is, it is an art 
infinitely removed from that to which all the 
world at once responds and surrenders. It is 
not at first seen to be art at all. The verse 
which in truth dances so cunningly appears 
to the uninitiated to stumble and halt. The 
music, which the common ear is so slow 
to catch, makes us think of those Platonic 
mysteries of abstract number seen only in 
their perfection by some godlike mathema- 
tician who lives rapt above sense and matter 
in the contemplation of the Idea of Good. 

But, if there is much in an art so con- 
summate as Milton's which escapes analysis, 
there are also elements which can be measured 
and weighed. Here as in the Paradise Lost 
students of metre can count and compare his 
stresses and pauses, and set out some finite 
portion of the infinite variety of rhythms 
which, even more needed here than in Paradise 
Lost, sustain the poem in its difficult flight 
over so apparently barren a country. The 
art of the poet as distinct from the musician 
is less difficult to trace. An avowed sequel 
has to recall its predecessor and yet not to 
recall it too much. Paradise Regained recalls 
Paradise Lost by its central action, a tempta- 



PARADISE REGAINED 211 

tion, by its council of devils, by its assembly 
of the heavenly host, by a hundred echoes of 
phrase and circumstance. But though the 
heavenly host is itself unchanged, though it is 
still the old " full frequence bright Of Angels " 
yet there is now no real council. The Son, 
the only spokesman who can address the 
Father, is no longer present, and even the 
hymn of the angels gets no more than a vague 
description. A greater change has come over 
the infernal council : scarcely any longer 
infernal, for their leader can now open his 
address to them with 

" O ancient Powers of Air and this wide 
World," 

and the meeting is held in mid air and no 
longer in hell. Nor is any rivalry attempted 
with the great debate of Paradise Lost : only 
enough to awaken its memory in the reader 
and to enable the poet to find a place in 
the second meeting for the most obvious of 
temptations which yet reverence forbade him 
to introduce into the main action. And note 
how this contains at least one of those small 
dramatic touches for which, except from Mr. 
Mackail, Milton has got too little credit. 
Satan asks how he is to assail the new enemy : 
and Belial, who stands for the sensualist man 
of the world, at once offers his suggestion. 



212 MILTON 

He is sure, as such men always are, that 
the lowest motive is invariably the true main- 
spring and explanation of all human actions : 
there is no beating about the bush with him : 
he is frank and cynical, and begins at once 
without shame, apology or preface — 

" Set women in his eye and in his walk." 

What could be more exactly in the downright 
manner affected by men of his type in the 
world of to-day and every day? And there 
are other similar touches. Then again the 
sequel recalls its predecessor when we hear 
Satan strike the very note he struck so often 
in Paradise Lost — 

" 'Tis true, I am that Spirit unfortunate," 

and when we see him fall in ruin at the awful 
end of the long debate — 

" Now shew thy progeny ; if not to stand 
Cast thyself down ; safely, if Son of God ; 
For it is written ; * He will give command 
Concerning thee to his Angels : in their 

hands 
They shall uplift thee, lest at any time 
Thou chance to dash thy foot against a 

stone.' 
To whom thus Jesus : Also it is written 
' Tempt not the Lord thy God.* He said, 

and stood : 
But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell." 



PARADISE REGAINED 213 

Nor must it be supposed by those who 
have not read the Paradise Regained that the 
bareness of its style is invariable. Most con- 
spicuous, for reasons of reverence no doubt, in 
the speeches of Christ, it is far less marked 
in those of Satan and disappears altogether 
in some of the descriptive passages. Take, 
for instance, the famous temptation of the 
banquet — 

" He spake no dream ; for, as his words had end. 
Our Saviour, lifting up his eyes, beheld 
In ample space under the broadest shade, 
A table richly spread in regal mode, 
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort 
And savour ; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, 
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, 
Grisamber-steamed ; all fish from sea or 

shore 
Freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin. 
And exquisitest name, for which was drained 
Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. 
Alas, how simple, to these cates compared. 
Was that crude apple that diverted Eve I 
And at a stately sideboard, by the wine. 
That fragrant smell diffused, in order stood 
Tall stripling youths rich-clad, of fairer hue 
Than Ganymed or Hylas ; distant more. 
Under the trees now tripped, now solemn 

stood, 
Nymphs of Diana's train, and Naiades 
With fruits and flowers from Amalthea's 

horn. 



214 MILTON 

And ladies of the Hesperides, that seemed 
Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since 
Of faery damsels met in forest wide 
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, 
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore." 

Paradise Lost itself contains no more in- 
tricately beautiful passage than this. It is 
one of those things that have been the delight 
and despair of poets ever since. For all his 
disdain of the follies of the Middle Age Milton 
can never touch the old romances, as Joseph 
Warton well noted, without immediately rising 
into the most exquisite poetry : and this 
reluctant homage of classical genius is the 
greatest tribute ever paid to their undying 
fascination. 

But of course such a passage as this is not 
typical of the poem : it is one of its far- 
shining heights which cannot be altogether 
missed even by eyes quite blind to the beauties 
of the lower country through which Paradise 
Regained takes the most part of its course. 
Ordinarily the poem is grave, plain and un- 
adorned, engaged in the discussion of moral 
problems which give little opportunity for the 
more obvious graces of poetry. The interest 
of the speeches which constitute the bulk of 
it is threefold : technical, in the rhythmical 
or metrical skill by which Milton sustains an 



PARADISE REGAINED 215 

abstract discourse expressed in unadorned 
language and keeps it at the level of high 
poetry; moral or intellectual, the interest 
of the subjects discussed; and, the greatest 
of all for many readers, autobiographical, 
the interest of the evidence they afford of 
the poet's own thoughts and character. All 
may be seen, for instance, in such a confession 
as that of Satan in the first book — 

*' Envy, they say, excites me, thus to gain 
Companions of my misery and woe ! 
At first it may be ; but, long since with woe 
Nearer acquainted, now I feel by proof 
That fellowship in pain divides not smart. 
Nor lightens aught each man's peculiar load." 

There is scarcely a word in it that prose cannot 
use even to-day. The thought is one that 
might come from any moralist ; there is nothing 
daring or imaginative about it. Yet out of 
this what poetry Milton has made ! The 
personal emotion of it, the note of confession 
and individual experience, has lifted it alto- 
gether above the level of the cold maxims 
of the preacher who gives no sign of having 
suffered, or sinned, or so much as lived, him- 
self. Then the art of it : so entirely unper- 
ceived by the ordinary reader, so invincible 
in its effect upon him. The whole secret of 
it defies analysis : but a few ingredients can 



216 MILTON 

be detected. There is comparatively little 
of Milton's favourite alliteration : the tone 
of the passage is too quiet for the free use of 
an artistic device so instantly visible. But 
note the beautiful line — 

" Companions of my misery and woe " — 

itself free flowing without a pause of any 
kind, so as to prepare the better for the 
full pause both of sense and of rhythm which 
separates it from what follows. Then there 
is the vivid conversational " At first it may 
be," and its pause, contrasting so finely with 
the next line where the pause is also after 
the fifth syllable, but with a totally different 
effect. Note again the variety of rhythm 
which distinguishes the last two lines. Neither 
has any strong pause in it : and they might 
so easily have been a monotonous repetition. 
Is it fanciful to think that, perhaps half un- 
consciously, Milton has suggested the quick 
stab of pain or sorrow in the swift movement 
of the first : and that the long-drawn rhythm 
of the second is meant to convey something 
of the dull years of misery which so often 
follow ? Its first six syllables — 

" Nor lightens aught each man's," 

if given their full effect of sound, take perhaps 
half as long again to read as the first six of the 



PARADISE REGAINED 217 

preceding line. In any case, whatever was 
meant by it, the Hne is a most beautiful one in 
itself, as well as full of one of the most moving 
of human things, a strong man's confession 
that his strength does not always suffice him. 
These obviously autobiographical passages 
are to be found all through the poem. There 
are the stately Roman embassies coming and 
going in all their pomp : in which it is surely 
Cromwell's Foreign Secretary who sees nothing 
but 

" tedious waste of time, to sit and hear 
So many hollow compliments and lies. 
Outlandish flatteries." 

There is the old contempt of war and those 
who in virtue of their victories 

" swell with pride, and must be titled Gods," 

and of the mob who praise and admire 

" they know not what, 
And know not whom, but as one leads the 

other ; 
And what delight to be by such extolled. 
To live upon their tongues and be their talk ? 
Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise. 
His lot who dares be singularly good." 

There is the contempt of wealth — 

" Extol not riches then, the toil of fools. 
The wise man's cumbrance, if not snare ; " 



218 MILTON 

a contempt which Milton shares with nearly all 
saints and heroes and most philosophers ; a little 
ungratefully, perhaps, as if forgetting that, 
compared with the mass of men, he had him- 
self always been rich, and that what he owed 
to the toil of his father had not proved in his 
case a snare or a cumbrance, but the necessary 
condition of the learning and the leisure he 
had used so nobly. Finally, to give no 
more instances, there is the confession at 
once so personal and so representative of the 
feeling of all men who have ever made the 
smallest effort to live well — 

" Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to 

walk, 
Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing 

to the ear. 
And tunable as sylvan pipe or song." 

Who knows whether behind such words as 
these there lies the memory of some rapturous 
vision of the new world of love as St. Paul 
saw it, which had been cooled only too soon 
by humbling experience of the difficulty of 
" bearing all things " when all things included 
Salmasius, or an unthankful daughter ? 

This grave introspective note, present from 
the first in everything written by Milton and 
far more conspicuous in Paradise Regained 
than in Paradise Lost, is felt still more in the 



SAMSON AGONISTES 219 

last of his works, the drama Samson Agonistes, 
It is in the Greek form with a Chorus : and 
is as broodingly full as ^Eschylus or Sophocles 
of the folly of man and the uncertainty and 
sadness of human life ; but Milton has added 
an angry sternness of judgment on the one 
hand, and on the other an assured faith in 
divine deliverance, both of which are rather 
Hebrew than Greek. Into this strange drama, 
so alien from all the literature of his day, 
Milton has poured all the thoughts and 
emotions with which the spectacle of his own 
life filled him. All through it we hear a faith 
that was strong but never blind battling with 
the spectacle of the wickedness of men and 
the dark uncertainty of the ways of God. 
The Philistines have triumphed, lords sit 
•' lordly in their wine " at Whitehall, the 
Dagon of prelatism is once more enthroned 
throughout the land, the saints are dispersed 
and forsaken, and he himself, who had as he 
thought so signally borne his witness for God, 
sits blind and sad in his lonely house, " to 
visitants a gaze Or pitied object," with no 
hope left of high service to his country and 
no prospect but that of a " contemptible old 
age obscure." No doubt he did not always 
feel like that, for the evidence shows him 
cheerful and friendly in company : and, of 



220 MILTON 

course, the picture has undergone the imagina- 
tive heightening of art besides being coloured 
by the story of Samson, so much sadder than 
Milton's own. But the lonely hours of a 
blind man of genius who has fought for a 
great cause and been utterly defeated must 
often be full of the hopeless half -resigned and 
half-rebellious broodings in which throughout 
Samson we hear so plainly the voice of Milton 
himself. 

" God of our fathers ! what is Man, 
That thou towards him with hand so various — 
Or might I say contrarious ? — 
Temper' st thy providence through his short 

course ; 
Not evenly, as thou rulest 
The angelic orders and inferior creatures mute, 
Irrational and brute? 
Nor do I name of men the common rout. 
That wandering loose about 
Grow up and perish as the summer fly. 
Heads without name, no more rememJbered; 
But such as thou hast solemnly elected. 
With gifts and graces eminently adorned. 
To some great work, thy glory, 
And people's safety, which in part they effect s 
Yet toward these thus dignified thou oft, 
Amidst their highth of noon, 
Changest thy countenance and thy hand, with 

no regard 
Of highest favours past 
From thee on them, or them to thee of service.'* 



SAMSON AGONISTES 221 

This is Milton undisguised speaking of and 
for himself. And so is the still sadder out- 
burst in the very first speech of Samson — 

" O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon. 
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse 
Without all hope of day ! 
O first-created beam, and thou great Word, 
* Let there be light, and light was over 

all'; 
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree ? 
The Sun to me is dark 
And silent as the Moon 
When she deserts the night. 
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave. 
Since light so necessary is to life. 
And almost life itself, if it be true 
That light is in the soul, 
She all in every part, why was the sight 
To such a tender ball as the eye confmed, 
So obvious and so easy to be quenched. 
And not, as feeling, through all parts 

diffused, 
That she might look at will through every 

pore? 
Then had I not been thus exiled from light. 
As in the land of darkness, yet in light. 
To live a life half dead, a living death. 
And buried ; but, O yet more miserable ! 
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave ; 
Buried, yet not exempt. 
By privilege of death and burial. 
From worst of other evils, pains, and wrongs. 
But made hereby obnoxious more 



222 MILTON ' 

To all the miseries of life, 
Life in captivity 
Among inhuman foes." 

This sublime music in which the soul's 
emotion finds and obeys its own law was 
scarcely audible to the age which followed 
Milton's death, when poets had concentrated 
all their art on the effort to make both 
language and metre as instantaneously in- 
telligible as possible. They succeeded much 
better in the second task than in the first : for 
the truth is that the exact meaning of a verse 
is much more often difficult to ascertain in 
the case of Pope than in the case of Milton. 
But no one has ever doubted how to read 
aloud a line of Pope or Dryden. And this 
has obvious advantages and was, of course, 
at first a great source of pleasure. It made 
Pope's poetry the most immediately popular 
we have ever had, as it still is the most effec- 
tive for public quotation. Almost everybody, 
as Mr. Bridges has said, " has a natural liking 
for the common fundamental rhythms " and 
*' it is only after long familiarity with them 
that the ear grows dissatisfied and wishes 
them to be broken." But in poetry as in 
music the more cultivated the ear the sooner 
it gets tired of being given too little to do : 
and as sooij as every warbler had Pope'§ 



SAMSON AGONISTES 223 

tune by heart critical readers began to wish 
for something less obvious. The ultimate 
result of that dissatisfaction was the metrical 
experiments of Coleridge and the rich harvest 
of varied rhythms and melody with which 
Shelley and Tennyson and Swinburne enriched 
the nineteenth century. And all this move- 
ment had also, of course, a retrospective effect. 
It may be true that, as Mr. Bridges says, 
" there are very few persons indeed who take 
such a natural delight in rhythm for its own 
sake that they can follow with pleasure a 
learned rhythm which is very rich in variety, 
and the beauty of which is its perpetual free- 
dom to obey the sense and diction;" but it 
could not fail to be the case that their number 
was increased by the comparative sensitive- 
ness to the more intricate music of words 
which was inevitably produced in those who 
had learnt much Shelley or Tennyson by heart. 
And such people at once heard things in 
Milton which were absolutely inaudible to 
the ears of Dr. Johnson's generation. The 
comparative subtlety, both in imagination 
and in form, of the poetry of the nineteenth 
century made it impossible for poets to com- 
pete with journalists for the attention of the 
big public as Pope had done triumphantly; 
but as a set off against that loss it gave a far 



224 MILTON 

richer delight to those who were capable of 
that interaction of the natural ear and the 
spiritual to which all great poetry makes its 
appeal. This led straight back to Milton who 
made that double appeal as only a very few 
poets in all the world have ever made it. And 
the more poetry is studied and loved as the 
greatest of the arts, as the medium through 
which that combination of the vision of 
genius with the slow trained cunning of the 
craftsm£),n, which is what great art is, finds 
its most perfect expression, the more will men, 
or at least Englishmen, return to Milton. And 
especially, in some ways, to Samson, where 
his art is at its boldest and freest, and where 
it suffered longest from the indifference of 
dull ears. 

A little book of this kind is not the place 
for a discussion of English metre, or even, in 
any detail, of Milton's. Those who wish to 
go into such studies will find much of what 
they want in the Poet Laureate's book on 
Miltofi^s Prosody, It is possible to disagree 
with some of his proposed scansions of doubtful 
lines, but it is impossible not to learn a great 
deal from suggestions as to the rhythmical 
effects intended by Milton which come, as 
these do, from one who is himself a master 
of rhythm and has never concealed the fact 



SAMSON AGONISTES 225 

that Milton's was one of the schools in which 
he passed his apprenticeship. So his analysis, 
line by line, of the opening of the first chorus 
of Samson will be a revelation to many of 
what they have, perhaps, never felt at all, or 
felt only unconsciously without understanding 
anything of what it was which they felt or 
why. But even without such help no one 
whose ear has had the smallest training 
can fail to notice some of the more daring 
of Milton's metrical effects. In the lines 
quoted above, for instance, who can miss the 
triple stab of passionate agony in the thrice 
repeated, strongly accented " dark, dark, 
dark " ? The most careless reader cannot 
fail to be arrested by the line, though he may 
not realize the means employed by Milton 
to enforce attention, the rare six stresses in 
a ten- syllabled line, the still rarer effect of 
three strongly stressed syllables following 
immediately upon one another, the inversion 
of three out of the five stresses of the next 
line, "irrecoverably dark" suggesting the 
spasmodic disorder of violent grief. These 
are certainly devices deliberately chosen for 
producing the required effects. And so, 
probably, are the more regular rhythm of the 
words which express the calming aspiration 
up to the throne of God, and the quiet mono- 



226 MILTON 

syllabic simplicity of the divine utterance, 
" Let there be light," which continues its 
softening influence over the return in the 
following lines to his own sad conditions. 
How smoothly the complaint now goes : 
" The sun to me is dark And silent as the 
moon." It is in comparison with the earlier 
abruptness as if he had gone through some- 
thing like the process of the psalmist, " until 
I went into the sanctuary of God : then 
understood I " what had before been " too 
painful for me." Then there is the com- 
paratively unmarked rhythm of the intel- 
lectual argumentative passage which follows : 
till emotion begins again to overwhelm 
reflection, and shows itself in the strong 
alliteration of "light," "land," "light," 
" live," " life," " living," and in the strong 
caesura after " buried," the more marked for 
coming so early in the verse. 

Such poor noting of technicalities as this 
gives, of course, no more of the secret of 
Milton's wonderful poetry than anatomy gives 
of the power and beauty of the human body. 
But it has its interest and even its use : pro- 
vided that too much importance is not attri- 
buted to it and that no one makes the mistake 
of the lady who, according to the story, 
hopefully asked the painter what he mixed 



SAMSON AGONISTES 227 

his paints with, and received the crushing 
reply, " With my brains. Madam." 

Samson Agonistes stands in marked contrast 
to its predecessor, Paradise Regained. And 
not only in being a drama. Its intense omni- 
present emotion makes a still more important 
difference. In passing from one to the other 
we pass from the least to the most emotional 
of Milton's works. This would in any case 
have been a gain for most readers : but the 
gain is made more important by the extreme 
severity of Milton's final poetic manner. A 
style which excludes almost all ornament 
stands in especial need of the support of a 
visibly felt emotion. It has been said by a 
living writer that *' when reason is subsidiary 
to emotion verse is the right means of expres- 
sion, and, when emotion to reason, prose." 
This is roughly true, though the poetry of 
mere emotion is poor stuff. The special 
faculty of the poet, as Johnson well said, is 
that of joining music with reason. That is 
to say that the poet unites thought and feeling 
and gives them perfect expression. They 
are not distinct : they become in his hands a 
new single life, a unity. You cannot separate 
the emotion from the thought in any great 
line of poetry. When Wordsworth talks of 
the " unimaginable touch of time," there is 



228 MILTON 

plainly emotion as well as thought and 
memory in his words : when Shelley cries in 
his despair — 

" Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar. 
Move my faint heart with grief, but with 
delight 
No more — O never more ! " 

it is no mere cry of the heart : the mind is in 
it too : and neither in him nor in Wordsworth 
can you get the two apart again after the 
poet has joined them together. 

Now, though in Paradise Regained the 
intellect is not allowed, as in much eighteenth- 
century poetry, to become so dominant as 
to make us feel that prose and not verse was 
the proper medium for what the poet had to 
say, yet it does play a greater part than it 
can commonly play with safety, perhaps a 
greater part than it plays in any other English 
poem of the first rank. It is only Milton's 
unfailing gift of poetic style which saves the 
situation. He could do what Wordsworth 
could not : conduct long discussions on 
abstract questions without descending from 
the note of poetry to that of the lecture-room. 
The gallant explorer who fights his way 
through the Prelude and the Excursion wins, 
as he deserves, a great reward, and a greater 
still if he does it a second time and a third. 



SAMSON AGONISTES 229 

when he has learnt that they both have 
marshy valleys into which he need not twice 
descend. But he has paid a price for the 
lesson, paid it in the endurance of a great 
deal of solid and heavy prose. That is partly 
because Wordsworth often thinks without 
feeling or imagining : he gives us his thought 
as it is in itself, as a professor of moral philo- 
sophy gives it, without passing it through the 
transforming processes of the emotions and 
the imagination. These hardly fail Milton half 
a dozen times in all his poetry : and the result 
is the difference between such lines as — 

" This is the genuine course, the aim, and end 
Of prescient reason ; all conclusions else 
Are abject, vain, presumptuous, and per- 
verse : " 

and such as Milton writes when he is nearest 
to bare thinking — 

" Who therefore seeks in these 
True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion 
Far worse, her false resemblance only meets, 
An empty cloud." 

The difference is also partly due to what, 
indeed, is another side of the same distinction : 
the fact that Wordsworth has not and Milton 
has a constant possession of the great or 
grand style. This is plain in such passages 
as those just quoted : it is plainer still where 
the poets come close to each other in 



230 MILTON 

descriptive passages : as, for instance, in 
Wordsworth's — 

" Negro ladies in white muslin gowns," 
and Milton's— 

" Dusk faces with white silken turbans 
wreathed ; " 

between which yawns an obviously impassable 
gulf. 

Milton is sometimes harsh, crabbed, grim in 
expression as in thought : but these things 
are not at all necessarily fatal to poetry as is 
the cool and contented obviousness of Words- 
worth's weak moments. Milton is occasion- 
ally contented in his own lofty fashion, but 
he is never cool, and never less so than in 
Samson, All through it he is face to face 
with a tremendous issue in which he himself is 
supremely interested : he is " enacting hell," 
to use Goethe's curious phrase, which fits 
Milton so much better than it fits the serenity 
of Homer. Twenty years before he had 
written, in quite another connection, " No 
man knows hell like him who converses most 
in heaven " : and now in his old age he 
embodies that tremendous truth in his last 
poem. All his poems are intensely emotional 
and personal : but none so much so as Samson 
Agonistes, where he is fixing all eyes on the 



SAMSON AGONISTES 231 

tragedy of his own life. The parallel between 
Samson and Milton does not extend, of course, 
to all the details. But even of them many 
correspond, such as the blindness, the dis- 
astrous marriage with " the daughter of an 
infidel," the old age of a broken and defeated 
champion of God become a gazing-stock to 
triumphant profanity. But more than any 
special circumstance it is the whole general 
position of Samson as a man dedicated from 
his birth to the service of God, and gladly 
accepting the dedication, yet failing in his 
task and apparently deserted by his God, 
which makes of him a type in which Milton 
can see himself and the Cromwellian saints 
who lie ground under the heels of the victorious 
Philistines of the Restoration. To him as 
to Samson the situation is one that makes 
questionings on the dark and doubtful ways 
of God unavoidable : darker to him even than 
to Samson : for he has no guilty memory of 
a supreme act of folly to explain the divine 
desertion. 

The action of the drama is extremely 
simple. Samson is found enjoying a brief re- 
spite from his punishment. The day is a feast 
of Dagon, and the Philistine " superstition " 
allows no work to be done on it. Accordingly 
an attendant who is a mute person is leading 



232 MILTON 

him to a bank v/here he is accustomed to take 
: what rest he is allowed and enjoy 

' " The breath of heaven fresh blowmg, pure 
and sweet 
With day-spring born; " 

that sensation of delicate scents and cool 
breezes which, as Milton knew only too well, 
mean so much more to the blind than to those 
who can see. Then his restless thoughts 
^begin to crowd upon him — 

" Why was my breeding ordered and pre- 
scribed 
As of a person separate to God, 
Designed for great exploits ? " 

The whole passage belongs naturally enough 
to Samson : but obviously here, as well as in 
the blindness, the poet is already thinking of 
himself. So again, when Samson proceeds to 

speak of being 

" exposed 
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong," 

one can scarcely miss a reference to the 
daughters who purloined and sold the blind 
father's books. When the soliloquy draws 
to an end the Chorus, men of his tribe, come 
to visit Samson. Not even Milton ever made 
the arrangement and sound of words do more 
to enforce their meaning than he does in this 
wonderful opening chorus — 



SAMSON AGONISTES 233 

" This, this is he ; softly a while ; 
Let us not break in upon him. 
O change beyond report, thought, or belief ! " 

They chant their inevitable wonder at the 
contrast between what Samson was and what 
he is. 

" O mirror of our fickle state. 
Since man on earth, unparalleled ! 
The rarer thy example stands, 
By how much from the top of wondrous 

glory. 
Strongest of mortal men. 
To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art 

fallen." 

No reader of Greek can fail to be reminded 
of more than one chorus in the CEdipus of 
Sophocles — 

io) yevsal ^Qorcbv 

<hg v/j^dg loa xal to jurjdsv ^cboag evaQid/ico — 

" Alas, ye generations of men, how utterly 
a thing of nought I count the life ye have 
to live ! For what man is there who wins 
more of happiness than just the seeming and 
after the semblance a falling away. With 
thy fate before mine eyes, unhappy CEdipus, I 
can call no earthly creature blest." Here and 
there, as in this passage, the parallel is very 
close. But Milton's genius is too great and 
self-rehant for mere imitation. He sometimes 
recalls the very words of Greek poets as he 

H2 



234 MILTON 

does those of the Bible : but that is not 
because he is artificially imitating either, but 
because he has assimilated the spirit of both 
and made them a part of himself. 

The Chorus express their sympathy with 
Samson and he replies, bitterly reproaching 
his own folly and that of the rulers of Judah 
who gave him up to their enemies. But 
human blindness will not ultimately defeat 
the ways of God : and the Chorus sing their 
song of faith, in which rhyme is called in to 
give its touch of impatient contempt at the 
folly of the atheist, 

" Just are the ways of God, 
And justifiable to men ; 
Unless there be who think not God at all. 
If any be, they walk obscure; 
For of such doctrine never was there school, 
But the heart of the* fool. 
And no man therein doctor but himself." 

So ends the first act or episode of the 
drama. The second is the visit of Samson's 
father Manoah, whose cry is — 

" Who would be now a father in my stead ? " 

He is trying to negotiate for his son's ransom : 
but Samson refuses, not desiring life, desiring 
rather to pay the full penalty of his sin. He 
cannot share his father's hopes that God will 
give him back the sight he so misused — 



SAMSON AGONISTES 235 

" All otherwise to me my thoughts portend, 
That these dark orbs no more shall treat 

with light, 
Nor the other light of life continue long. 
But yield to double darkness nigh at hand : 
So much I feel my genial spirits droop, 
My hopes all flat ; Nature within me seems 
In all her functions weary of herself ; 
My race of glory run, and race of shame. 
And I shall shortly be with them that rest." 

So Manoah leaves him, and in a noble lyric 
he laments over his greatest sufferings, which 
are not those of the body but those of the 
mind — 

" which no cooling herb 
Or med'cinal liquor can assuage. 
Nor breath of vernal air from snowy Alp." 

A choral song on the mysterious dealings 
of God closes this episode which is followed 
by the most dramatically effective in the 
poem, that of the visit of Dalila. The moment 
the blind man is told that it is " Dalila, thy 
wife," he cries — 

" My wife ! my traitress ! let her not come 
near me : " 

and his reply to her offer of penitence, affec- 
tion and help, begins with the daringly 
expressive line — 

** Out, out, hyaena ! these are thy wonted arts." 

A long and telling debate follows, in which 



236 MILTON 

Dalila makes very good points, one of them 
recalling the scene in which Eve reproaches 
Adam for indulging her instead of exercising 
his right to command and control the weakness 
of her sex. To this argument Dalila receives 
the stern, characteristically Miltonic reply — 

" All wickedness is weakness : that plea, 
therefore 
With God or man will gain thee no remis- 
sion," 

He refuses her intercession with the Philistine 
lords, forbids her even to touch his hand; 

" Not for thy life, lest fierce remembrance 
wake 
My sudden rage to tear thee joint by joint," 

and drives her to remind him defiantly that, 
whatever he and his Hebrews may say of her, 
she appeals to another tribunal of fame — 

" In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath, 
I shall be named among the famousest 
Of women, sung at solemn festivals. 
Living and dead recorded." 

So she goes out, and the Chorus make Miltonic 
meditations on the unhappiness of marriage 
and the divinely appointed subjection of 
women. 

The next visitor is Harapha, the Philistine 
giant, who comes to taunt Samson, and is 
defied by him to mortal combat. This epi- 



SAMSON AGONISTES 237 

sode is perhaps the least interesting, but it 
advances the action by exhibiting Samson's 
returning sense that God is still with him and 
will yet do some great work through him. 
It fitly leads to the chorus — 

" O, how comely it is, and how reviving 
To the spirits of just men long oppressed, 
When God into the hands of their deliverer 
Puts invincible might. 
To quell the mighty of the earth, the 

oppressor. 
The brute and boisterous force of violent 

men. 
Hardy and industrious to support 
Tyrannic power, but raging to pursue 
The righteous and all such as honour truth ! " 

In the next scene an officer comes to demand 
Samson's presence at the feast of Dagon that 
he may entertain the Philistine lords with 
feats of strength. He at first dismisses the 
messenger with a contemptuous refusal : but, 
with a premonition of the end which recalls 
CEdipus at Colonus, he suddenly changes his 

mind — 

" I begin to feel 
Some rousing motions in me, which dispose 
To something extraordinary my thoughts. 

If there be aught of presage in the mind, 
This day will besremarkable in my life 
By some great act, or of my days the last.'*' 



238 MILTON 

" Go, and the Holy One 
Of Israel be thy guide," 

sing the Chorus : and he leaves the scene, like 
OEdipus, to return no more, but to be more 
felt in his absence than in his presence. 
Manoah re-enters to utter his further hopes 
of ransom, in which there is a note of Sopho- 
clean irony recalling the ignorant optimism 
of OEdipus in the Tyrannus; and as he and 
the Chorus talk they hear at first a loud 
shouting, apparently of triumph, and then 
another louder and more terrible — 

Manoah, 

" O what noise ! 
Mercy of Heaven ! what hideous noise was 

that? 
Horribly loud, unlike the former shout." 

Chorus. 

" Noise call you it, or universal groan, 
As if the whole inhabitation perished ? " 

They dare not enter the city : and, as they 
speculate on what this great event can be, 
a Hebrew spectator of the catastrophe comes 
up and, after some brief exchange of question 
and answer exactly in the manner of the Greek 
tragedians, tells the whole story at length. 
The end has come. Samson is dead, but 
death is swallowed up in victory : what has 
happened is the last and most tremendous 



SAMSON AGONISTES 239 

triumph of the divinely chosen hero whose 
death is more fatal to his country's enemies 
than even his life had been. There is nothing 
left to do but to close the drama, as most 
Greek tragedies close, with a brief choral song 
of submission to the divine governance of the 
world: 

" All is best, though we oft doubt 
What the unsearchable dispose 
Of Highest Wisdom brings about. 
And ever best found in the close. 
Oft He seems to hide his face. 
But unexpectedly returns, 
And to his faithful champion hath in place 
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza 

mourns, 
And all that band them to resist 
His uncontrollable intent. 
His servants He, with new acquist 
Of true experience from this great event, 
With peace and consolation hath dismissed, 
And calm of mind, all passion spent." 

Such is Milton's drama : a thing worth 
dwelling on as entirely unique in any modern 
language. Some good judges have thought 
it the finest of his works. That will not be 
admitted if poetry is to be judged either by 
universality of appeal or by extent and 
variety of range. U Allegro and II Penseroso 
will always have far more readers : and 
Paradise Lost embraces an immeasurably 



240 MILTON 

greater span of human life. But, if not the 
greatest, Samson is probably for its own 
audience the most moving of Milton's works. 
It is not everybody who has in him the grave 
emotions to which it appeals : but whoever 
has will find them stirred by Samson as few 
other books in all the literature of the world 
can stir them. 

It is curious to think of Milton composing 
such a drama in the midst of the theatrical 
revival of the Restoration. Did ever poet 
set himself in such opposition to the literary 
current of his day? Dryden's unbounded 
admiration for him is well known : but he 
understood the genius of Paradise Lost so 
little as to make an opera out of it, and he 
must have understood even less of Samson, 
The drama was then so much the most 
fashionable form of literature that he may 
have felt that in writing The State of Innocence 
and its preface he was taking the best means 
of directing public attention to Paradise Lost, 
But he would scarcely have tried to do the 
same for Samson, He had wished, perhaps, as 
Mr. Verrall has suggested, to write an epic and 
had failed to do so : hence his profound 
reverence for the man who had not failed. 
But he had written many dramas and here 
he had succeeded : he had pleased both his 



SAMSON AGONISTES 241 

contemporaries and himself. He would feel 
no need there to take lessons from Milton. 
Nor is he to be blamed. He and his fellow 
dramatists are justly criticized for many 
things, but there is nothing to complain of 
in their unlikeness to Milton. They wrote 
for the stage. He avowedly did not. They 
wrote in the spirit of the theatre of their day, 
with the object of providing themselves with 
a little money and " the town " with a few 
hours of more or less intellectual amusement. 
He wrote out of his own mind and soul, not 
for the entertainment of the idle folk of his 
own or any other day, but for men who in 
all times and countries should prove capable 
of knowing a great work when they saw it. 
Besides, his contemporary dramatists followed, 
quite legitimately, the theatrical traditions 
of England or France : he the very different 
dramatic system of the Greeks. His drama 
is what Greek tragedies were, an act of 
religion. It could take its place quite natur- 
ally, as they did, as part of a great national 
religious festival performed on a holy day. 
It is like them in the solemn music of its 
utterance : in its deep sense of the gravity 
of the issues on which human life hangs. It 
is like them also in technical points such as 
the use of a Chorus to give expression to the 



242 MILTON 

spectator's emotions, the paucity of actors pre- 
sent on the stage at any moment, the curious 
imitation, to be seen also in Comus, of the 
Greek stichomuthia, in which a verbal passage 
of arms is conducted on the principle of giving 
each speaker one line for his attack or retort. 

There are, indeed, some fundamental differ- 
ences. They are important enough to have 
led so great a critic as Professor Jebb to 
argue that Milton's drama is too Hebrew to 
be Hellenic at all. His point is that Greek 
tragedy aims at producing an imaginative 
pleasure by arousing a " sense, on the one 
hand, of the heroic in man; on the other 
hand, of a superhuman controlling power " ; 
and he asserts that this is not the method 
adopted by Milton in Samson, Samson is 
throughout a free man; his misfortunes are 
the fruit of his own folly. God is still on his 
side and his death is a patriotic triumph, not, 
like the death of Heracles, who resembles him 
in so many ways, merely the final proof of 
the all-powerful malignity of fate. 

No one will venture to differ from Jebb 
on such a question without a sense of great 
temerity. But perhaps the truth is that 
one who had lived all his life, as Jebb had, 
in the closest intimacy with the Greek drama, 
would be apt to feel small differences from 



SAMSON AGONISTES 243 

it too much and broad resemblances too 
little. To the shepherd all his sheep differ 
from each other : the danger for him is to 
forget, what the ignorant stranger sees, that 
they are also all very much alike. So Jebb 
is no doubt perfectly right in the distinc- 
tion he makes : but he is surely blinded by 
his own knowledge when he argues from it 
that Samson Agonistes '' is a great poem and 
a noble drama; but neither as poem nor as 
drama is it Hellenic." Of that question 
comparative ignorance is perhaps a better 
judge. For it can still see that the broad 
division which separates the world's drama 
into two kinds is a real thing, and that Milton's 
drama belongs in spite of differences unques- 
tionably to the Greek kind and not to the 
other, both by its method and by its spirit. 
There can be no real doubt that it is far more 
like the Prometheus or the (Edipus than it is 
like Hamlet or All for Love. Probably no 
great tragedy of any sort can be made without 
that sense of the contrast between man's will 
and the " superhuman controlling power " of 
which Jebb speaks as peculiarly Greek. 
Certainly it is present in the greatest of 
Shakspeare's tragedies, and not seldom finds 
open expression. " There's a divinity that 
shapes our ends." 



244 MILTON 

But the point is that in Samson^ the note 
of which is always the classical, never the 
mystical or romantic, this sense is present, 
not in Shakspeare's way, but substantially 
in the Greek way. The fact that Samson is 
free and that his God is his friend does not 
prevent his feeling just in the Greek way that 
God's ways are dark and inscrutable, past 
man's finding out, and far above out of the 
reach of his control. It does not prevent his 
being helpless as well as heroic, fully conscious 
that all his strength leaves him still a weak 
child at the absolute disposal of incompre- 
hensible Omnipotence. So the whole atmo- 
sphere of the play, as well as its formal mould, 
will always recall the Greek tragedies. And 
rightly : the likenesses of every kind are far 
greater than the differences. The distinctions 
which led Jebb to declare it was not Hellenic 
at all are far less important than the kinship 
which made a still greater critic, the poet 
Goethe, declare that it had " more of the 
antique spirit than any production of any 
other modern poet." 

A more obvious and perhaps more impor- 
tant difference than that on which Jebb lays 
such stress is, of course, the fundamental one 
that the Greek plays were written for per- 
formance and that many of them have 



SAMSON AGONISTES 245 

elaborately contrived " plots." No one sup- 
poses that Samson would be effective on the 
stage; but the modern dramatist who could 
make his play as exciting to the spectator as 
the CEdipus Tyrannus or Electra of Sophocles, 
or the Hippolytus or Medea of Euripides, 
would assuredly be no ordinary playwright. 
This Milton did not attempt. His drama 
resembles rather the earlier Greek tragedies 
where the lyrical element is still the principal 
thing while the " plot " and the persons who 
act its story play a comparatively subordinate 
part. It is, at any rate in form, more like 
iEschylus than Sophocles, and more like the 
Persce and the Prometheus than the Oresteian 
Trilogy. To the Prometheus, indeed, it bears 
particularly close and obvious resemblances; 
for instance, both have a heroic and defiant 
prisoner as their principal figure, and as their 
minor figures a succession of friends and 
enemies who visit him. 

However, literary parallels and precedents 
of this kind are perhaps rather interesting 
than important. Milton's greatness is his 
own. Only the fact remains that, as it was 
of an order that need not fear to measure 
itself with the Greeks and as he happened to 
put its dramatic expression into a Greek form, 
he has given us something which comes far 



246 MILTON 

nearer to producing on us the particular 
impression of sublimity made by the greatest 
Greek dramas than anything else in English or 
perhaps in any modern language. In English 
nothing worth mentioning of the kind has 
been attempted, till in our own day the present 
Poet Laureate wrote his Prometheus the Fire- 
Giver and Achilles in Scyros, But, interesting 
and beautiful as these are, they make no 
pretence to rival Samson Agonistes. They 
are altogether on a smaller scale of art, of 
thought, of emotion. 

Samson Agonistes is Milton's last word and 
on the whole his saddest. Yet the final effect 
of great art is never sad. The sense of great- 
ness transcends all pain. In the preface of 
Samson Milton alludes to Aristotle's remark 
that it is the function of tragedy to effect 
through pity and fear a proper purgation of 
these emotions. Whatever be the precise 
meaning of that famous and disputed sentence, 
there is no doubt that Milton gives part of its 
general import truly enough when he para- 
phrases it " to temper and reduce them to just 
measure with a kind of delight stirred up by 
reading or seeing those passions well imitated." 
And its application extends far beyond the 
mere field of tragedy. So far as other kinds 
of poetry, or indeed any of the arts, deal with 



SAMSON AGONISTES 247 

subjects that arouse any of the deeper human 
emotions, the law of purification by a kind 
of dehght is one by which they stand or fall. 
A crucifixion which is merely painful, as 
many primitive crucifixions are, or merely 
disgusting, as many later ones are, is so far 
a failure. It has not done the work art has 
to do. Shakspeare knew this well enough, 
though he very likely never thought about it. 
The final word of his great tragedies is one of 
sorrow overpassed and transformed. " The 
rest is silence;" "Dost thou not see my 
baby at my breast That sucks the nurse 
asleep ? " "I have almost forgot the taste 
of fears ; " " My heart doth joy that yet in 
all my life I found no man but he was true to 
me ! " This is the note always struck before 
the very end comes. And Milton, so unlike 
Shakspeare both as man and as artist, is no 
less conspicuous than he in the strict observ- 
ance of this practice. All his poems, without 
exception, end in quietness and confidence. 
The beauty of the last lines of Paradise Lost, 
to which early critics were so strangely blind, 
is now universally celebrated — 

" Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped 
them soon ; 
The world was all before them, where to 
choose 



248 MILTON 

Their place of rest, and Providence their 

guide. 
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps 

and slow, 
Through Eden took their solitary way." 

The storm and stress of day are over and are 
followed by the passionless quiet of evening. 
So in Paradise Regained, A modern poet 
would have been tempted to end at line 635, 
with a kind of dramatic fall of the curtain — 

" on thy glorious work 
Now enter, and begin to save Mankind." 

Not so Milton. As after the most awe- 
inspiring death known to literature the 
CEdipus Coloneus closes on the note of 
acquiescent peace — 

" Come, cease lamentation, lift it up no more ; 
for verily these things stand fast ; " 

so Milton ends the long debate of his poem, not 
with victory, but with silence — 

" He, unobserved. 
Home to his mother's house private re- 
turned." 

It is indeed just the opposite in one way 
of the conclusion of Paradise Lost, The man 
and woman who had fallen before the Tempter 
had no home to return to : they must seek a 
new " place of rest " elsewhere in the new 
world that was before them. The Man who 



SAMSON AGONISTES 249 

had vanquished him could go back quietly 
to the home of his childhood. But the con- 
trast is external, the likeness essential. For 
the first man as well as the second there is 
an appointed place of rest and a Providence 
to guide : the two poems can both end on 
the same note of that peace which follows 
upon the right understanding of all great 
experiences. 

This, which is only implied in his earlier 
poems, is almost expressly set forth in the 
last of all Milton's words, the already quoted 
conclusion of Samson — 

" His servants He, with new acquist 
Of true experience from this great event, 
With peace and consolation hath dismissed. 
And calm of mind, all passion spent." 

Milton was a passionate man who lived in 
passionate times. Neither his passions nor 
those of the men of his day are of very much 
matter to us now. But the art in which he 
" spent " them, in which, that is to say, he 
embodied, transcended and glorified them, 
till through it he and we alike attain to con- 
solation and calm, is an eternal possession 
not only of the English race but of the whole 
world. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The literature that in one way or another deals with 
Milton is, of course, immense. His name fills more than half 
of one of the volumes of the great British Museum Catalogue, 
more than sixteen pages being devoted to the single item 
of Paradise Lost. They afiEord perhaps the most striking 
of all proofs of the universality of his genius; for they 
include translations into no fewer than eighteen languages, 
many of which possess a large choice of versions. Into more 
than a very small fraction of such a vast field it is obviously 
impossible to enter here. Only a few notes can be given, 
under the four headings of Poetry, Prose, Biography and 
Criticism. 

Poetry 

Of the poetry, it may be worth saying, though MSS. hardly 
come within the scope of a brie: bibliography of this sort, 
that a manuscript, mainly in the handwriting of Milton 
himself and containing many of his early poems, is preserved 
in the Library oi Trinity College, Cambridge. The printed 
copies, of course, begin with those published in his own life- 
time. They contain practically the whole of his poetry. 
The most important are the volume containing his early 
poems issued in 1645, Paradise Lost which first appeared in 
1667, Paradise Regained and Samsorb Agonistes which followed 
in 1671, and a re-issue in 1673, with additions, of the volume 
of his minor poems already printed in 1045. The first com- 
plete edition was Tha Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton, 
issued by Jacob Tonson in 1695. 

So much for the bare text. Annotation naturally soon 
followed. The earliest commentator was Patrick Hume 
who published an edition of the poems with notes on Paradise 
Lost in 1695. But the most famous, though also least im. 
portant, of Milton's early critics was the greatest of English 
scholars, Richard Bentley, who in 1732 issued an edition of 
Paradise Lost in which whole passages were relegated to the 
margin as the spurious interpolations of an imaginary editor. 
Such a book is, of course, merely a curiosity connecting two 
250 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 251 

great names. The real beginning in the work of editing 
Milton as a classic should be edited e was made by Thomas 
Newton, afterwards Bishop of Bristol, who in 1749 brought 
out an edition of Paradise Lost, " with Notes of Various 
Authors," and followed it in 1752 with a similar volume 
including Paradise Regained and the minor poems. Newton's 
work was often reprinted, and remained the standard edition 
till it was superseded by that of, the Rev." H. J. Todd which 
first appeared in 1801. The final issue of Todd is that of 
1826 in six volumes which, in spite of many notes which are 
defective, many which are antiquated and some which are 
superfluous, may still claim to be the best library edition of 
Milton. Among the best of those which' have appeared since 
are Thomas Keightley's, published in 1859, which contains 
excellent notes, and Prof. David Masson's, which is the work 
of the most learned and devoted of all Milton's editors. Both 
of these have the advantage of Todd in some respects; 
Keightley in acuteness and penetration, Masson in com- 
pleteness of knowledge. But no single editor's work can be 
a perfect substitute for a variorum edition like that of Todd, 
giving the comments and suggestions of many different 
minds. The most complete edition of Masson's work is the 
final library one in three volumes, 1890; there is also a 
convenient smaller issue, based on this, but omitting some 
of its editorial matter. It was last printed in three volumes 
1893. It contains a Memoir, rather elaborate Introductions to 
all the poems, an Essay on Milton's English and Versification, 
and reduced Notes. 

A text with Critical Notes by W. Aldis Wright was issued 
by the Cambridge University Press in one volume, 1903. The 
text of the earliest printed editions of the several poems was 
reprinted in 1900 in an edition prepared for the Clarendon 
Press by the Rev. H. C. Beeching. 

It may be worth while adding that Milton's Latin and 
Italian poems were translated by the poet Cowper and 
printed in 1808 by his biographer, Hayley, in a beautiful 
quarto volume with designs by Flaxman. These translations 
are reprinted in the ** Aldine " edition of Milton, 1826. 
Masson has also given translations of most of them In his 
Life of Milton and in his 1890 library edition of the Poems. 

Prose 

The Prose works were, of course, mostly issued as books 
or pamphlets In Milton's lifetime. They were collected by 
Toland in three volumes folio, 1698. There are several more 
modern editions ; as that published in 1806 in seven volumes 



252 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

with a Life, by Charles Symmons ; that of Pickering, who 
included them in his fine eight-volume edition, The Works 
of John Milton in Verse and Prose, Edited by John Mitford, 
1851 ; and that in Bohn's Standard Library, in six volumes, 
edited, with some notes of a somewhat controversial char- 
acter, by J. A. St. John, 1848. The first volume of a new 
edition edited by Sir Sidney Lee appeared in 1905. One of 
the most curious of the prose works, the De Doctrina Christiana 
or Treatise of Christian Doctrine, was not known till 1823, 
when it was discovered in the State Paper Office. It was 
edited, with an English translation, by the Rev. C. R. Sumner 
In 1825 and is included in Bohn's edition. 

Biography 

The earliest sources for the biography of Milton, outside 
his own works, are the account given in the Fasti Oxonienses 
of Anthony a Wood, 1691, the Brief Lives of John Aubrey^ 
and the Life prefixed by the poet's nephew, Edward PhiUips, 
to an edition of the Letters of State, printed in 1694. A very 
large number of Lives of Milton have been written since, 
based on these materials and those collected from a few 
other sources. The most famous and in some ways the best, 
in spite of its unfairness, is that of Johnson, to be found in 
his Lives of the Poets. The best short modern Life is Mark 
Pattison's masterly, though occasionally wilful, little book 
in the English Men of Letters Series. For the library and 
for students all other biographies have been superseded by 
the great work of David Masson, who spared no labours to 
investigate every smallest detail of the life of Milton and to 
place the whole in the setting of an elaborate history of 
England in Milton's day. The value of the book is some- 
what impaired by the very strong Puritan and anti-Cavalier 
partisanship of the writer; and its style suffers from an 
imitation of Carlyle. But nothing can seriously detract 
from the immense debt every student of Milton owes to the 
author of this monumental biography which appeared in 
seven volumes, 1859-1894. 

An interesting critical discussion of the various portraits 
representing or alleged to represent Milton is prefixed to the 
Catalogue of the Exhibition held at Christ's College Cam- 
bridge during the Milton Tercentenary in 1908. It is by 
Dr. G. C. Williamson. 

Criticism 

A poet at once so learned and so great as Milton inevitably 
invited criticism. The first and most generous of his critics 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 253 

was his great rival Dryden, who, in a few words of the preface 
to The State of Innocence, published the year after Milton's 
death, led the note of praise, which has been echoed ever 
since by speaking of Paradise Lost as " one of the greatest, 
most noble and most sublime poems which either this age or 
nation has produced." The next great name in the list is 
that of Addison, who contributed a series of papers on MUton 
to the Spectator in 1712. Like all criticism except the work 
of the supreme masters, they are written too exclusively 
from the point of view of their own day to retain more than 
a small fraction of their value after two hundred years have 
passed. But they are of considerable historical interest 
and may still be read with pleasure, like everything written 
by Addison. A less sympathetic but finer piece of work is 
the critical part of Johnson's famous Life. It is full of 
crudities of every sort, such as the notorious remark that 
** no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with 
pleasure had he not known the author " ; and perhaps 
nothing Johnson ever wrote displayed more nakedly the narrow 
limits of his appreciation of poetry. But, in spite of all its 
defects, it exhibits its writer's great gifts; and its absolute 
and unshrinking sincerity, its half-reluctant utterance of 
some of the truest praise ever spoken of Milton, its profound 
knowledge of the way in which the human mind approaches 
both literature and life, will always preserve it as one of the 
most interesting criticisms which Milton has provoked. 
Johnson's friend, Thomas Warton, in his edition of the minor 
poems issued in 1785, led the way to an understanding of 
much in Milton to which Johnson and his school were entirely 
blind. This movement has continued ever since, and is seen 
in the immense influence Milton had upon the poets of the 
nineteenth century, especially upon Wordsworth and Keats; 
an influence of exactly the opposite sort to that which he 
exercised with such disastrous effect upon many poets of the 
century immediately succeeding his own. It is also seen in 
the finer intelligence of the critical studies of his work. These 
are far too many to mention here. Among the best are 
Hazlitt's Lecture on Shakspeare and Milton in his Lectures on 
the English Poets ; Matthew Arnold's speech at the unveiling 
of a Milton memorial, printed in the second series of his 
Essays in Criticism; Sir Walter Raleigh's volume, 3Iilton, 
published in 1900, and The EpiCy by Lascelles Abercrombie, 
1914, which is full of fine and suggestive criticism of Milton. 
Milton's Prosody by Robert Bridges, 1901, is the best study of 
the metre and scansion of Milton's later poems, especially of 
Paradise Lost. 



INDEX TO PRINCIPAL PERSONS, PLACES, 
AND WORKS MENTIONED 



Aberorombie, L., 136-7, 253 

Absalom and Achitophel, 105 

Achilles in Scyros, 246 

Addison, Joseph, 77, 253 

Adonais, 125 

Ad Patrem, 39-40. 

^neid. The, 150, 175, 196 

jEschylus, 245 

A Kempis, Thomas, 147 

Aldersgate Street, 46 

All for Love, 2^^^ 

Allegro, L', 41, 70, 93, 99, 106 

etsqq., 12S,2SQ 
Anglesey, Earl of, 72, 82 
Annesley, Arthur, 72 
Aquinas, Thomas, 157 
Arbuthnot, Epistle to, 105 
Arcades, 41, 42 
Arcadia, 58 

Are<ypagitica, 44, 49, 64. 
Arianism, 204 
Ariosto, 153 
Ai'istotle, 86, 200 
Arnold. Matthew, 164, 253 
Arthurian Epic (planned), 45, 

148-9 
At a Solemn Music, 13, 42, 97, 

100, > 103, 147 
Athens, 205-6, 209 
Aubrey, John, 29, 252 

Barbican, the, 54 

Baroni, Leonora, 44-5 

Barrow, Samuel, 82 

Beecliing, Rev. H. C, 251 

Bentley, Richard, 250 

BibUography, 250-3 

Blake, Admiral, 57 

Bohn's Standard Library, 252 

Bow Church, 25 

Bread Street, 24, 75 

Bridges, Robert, 26, 108, 222, 223, 

246,253 
Brief lAves, 252 
Buckingham, Duke of, 58 
Byron, Lord, 90 

Cambridge, 28, 29, 30, 31-7, 39, 
42, 85, 120, 121, 124, 250, 
252 

Carlyle, Thomas, 252 



254 



Caroline, Queen, 77 

Charles I, 11, 28, 58, 59, 60, 63, 

64, 67, 71, 72, 86 
Charles H, 47, 60, 65, 71, 73, 82, 

86 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 90, 111 
Christina, Queen of Sweden, 60 
Christ's College, Cambridge, 28, 

29,120,121,124,252 
Clarendon, Earl of, 73 
Clarges, Sir Thomas, 72 
Coleridge, S. T., 206 
Comus, 13, 41, 42, 95, 100, 110, 

112-13 et sqq., 128, 242 
Constable, 135 
Coriolanus, 85 
Cowper, WiUiam, 69, 251 
Criticisms, 252-3 
Cromwell, OUver, 55, 57, 63, 64, 

67, 68, 69, 71, 133, 139, 176 

Dante, 10, 11-12, 33, 120, 153-7 
Daphnaida, 125 
Davenant, William, 72 
Befensio Regia, 60, 61 
Defensio Secunda, 61 
De Quincey, Thomas, 96 
Diodati, Charles, 42, 124, 125 
Divina Commedia, La, 120, 157 
Divorce pamphlets, 50 et sqq . 
Doctrina Christiana, De, 252 
Dorset, Earl of, 81 
Dowlaud, Robert, 28 
Drayton, Michael, 124 
Drummond, Wilham, 124, 135 
Dryden, John, 80-2, 90, 103, 
104-5, 117, 241, 253 

Eikon Basilike, the, 57-8 

EikonoMastes, 58, 61 

Electra, The, 245 

Elizabeth, Queen, 85 

English Men of Letters Series, 252 

Epic, The, 253 

Epigrams, Latin, on La Baroni, 45 

Epitaph on the Marchioness of 

Winchester, 36, 37, 97, 103 
Epitaphium Damonis, 124 
Essays in Criticism, 253 
Euripides, 77, 82, 245 
Excursion, The, 136, 228-9 



INDEX 



255 



Faerie Queen, The, 115 
Fairfax, General, 139, 171 
Faithful Shepherdess, The, 115 
Fasti Oxonienses, 252 
Faust, 196 
Fire of London, 75 
Flaxman, John, 251 
Fletcher, John, 107, 115 
Florence, 43, 44, 46 
France, 43, 46, 59 

GalUeo, 44, 45 

Gerusalemme Conquistata (Tasso), 

45 
Gibbons, Orlando, 28 
Goetlie, J. W. von, 230, 244 
Gorges, Mrs., 125 
Grotius, Hugo, 43 

Hamlet, 24, 243 

Hampden, John, 171 

Hayley, William, 251 

Hazlitt, William, 253 

Eippolytus, 245 

History of Britain, 78 

Homer, 77, 82, 84, 89, 152, 153, 

155, 171, 230 
Horace, 69 

Horton, 37, 40, 41, 42, 111 
Hume, Patrick, 250 

Iliad, The, 154, 155, 157, 162 
Imitation, The, of Christ, 147-8 
Indemnity, Act of, 72, 73, 74 
Independent Army, The, 55, 56 
ItaUan travels, 43-6 

James I, 58 

Jebb, Prof., 242-3. 244 

Job, Book of, 21, 82 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 125, 126, 

160, 162, 175, 194, 196, 206, 

207, 227, 252, 253 
Jones, Inigo, 16, 114 
Jonson, Ben, 114, 115 

Keats, John, 79, 90, 102, 110, 

125, 253 
Keightley, Thomas, 251 
King, Edward, 42, 91, 124, 125, 

127, 128-31 

Landor, Walter Savage, 132 
Lawes, Henry, 41, 82, 91, 116, 119 
Lawrence, Henry, 69-70, 133 
Lectures on the English Poets, 253 
Lee, Sir Sidney, 252 
Letters of State, 252 
Lives of Milton, 251, 252, 253 
Lives of ihe Poets, 252 
London, 25, 49 ; fire of, 75 



Long Parhament, 47, 63, 64, 171 
Lycidas, 13, 41, 42, 90, 91, 100, 
106, 123 et sqq. 

MackaU, J. W., 94-5, 206, 211 

Manso, Giovanni, 45 

Marini, 45 

Marlowe, Christopher, 107 

Marvell, Andrew, 69, '73 

Massacres in Piedmont, sonnets 

on, 68, 133, 139, 140-1 
Masson, D., 24, 52, 68, 73, 75,251 
Medea^ The, 2i5 
Meredith, George, 134 
Milton, 253 

Milton's Prosody, 224, 253 
Milton's relations : — 

Daughters, 11, 54, 69, 75-77, 218 
Deborah, 77-8 

Father, 27, 29, 37, 38-40, 42, 
43, 49, 54, 75 

Infant son, 76 

Mother, 40 

Nephews, 46, 54, 61, 70, 252 

Wives — 
First, see Powell, Mary. 
Second, 54, 69, 71 
Third, 54 
Mitford, John, 252 
Monk, General, 72 
Morley, Thomas, 28 
Morrice, — , 72 
Morus, 69 

Napoleon, 9, 139 
Newbolt, Henry, 120 
Newton, Thomas, 251 

Ode on the Nativiiy, 35-6, 37, 91, 

93-4, 97, 98-103 
Odyssey, The, 162, 196 
(Edipus Coloneus, 22,1, 248 
(Edipus Tyrannus, 233, 238, 243 
On Attaining the Age of Twenty- 

three, sonnet, 91, 133 
On His Blindness, sonnet, 62-3. 

133 
On the Death of a Fair Infant, 35, 

97-9 
Orations, 34-5 
Othello, 150 
Ovid, 33 , 77, 124 

Pamphlets, 49, 56, 69, 71 
Paradise Lost, 13, 24, 25, 28, 44, 

47, 55, 71, 78, 79, 80, 82, 88; 

89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 101, 104, 106! 

112, 113, 118, 120, 123, 125; 

137, 142 et sqq., 196, 197 et sqq 

239, 240, 247, 248,250, 251, 253 



256 



INDEX 



Paradise Regained, 13, 24, 44, 

78, 167, 196 et sqq., 227, 248, 

250, 251 
Passion, The, 103 
Pattison, Mark, 131, 132, 197, 252 
Penseroso, II, 41, 70, 93, 100, 106 

et sqq,, 239 
Persce, The, 245 
Petrarch, 33, 134, 135 
Phillips, Edward, 252 
Pickering, William, 252 
Pindar, 117 

Plato, 8, 9-10,21,111,156 
Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, 115 
Poems, editions of, 250-1, 252 
Poetical Works, The, of Mr. John 

Milton, 250 
Pope, A., 85, 90, 91, 105, 222, 223 
Portraits, 252 
Powell famUy, 50, 53 
Powell, Mary, 50-4, 69, 71 
Prelude, The, 136, 228-9 
Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, 

60, 61 
Prometheus the Fire-Giver, 246 
Prometheus Unbound, 102 
Prometheus Vinctus, 21, 243, 245 
Prose Works, 47 et sqq., 251-2 
Psalms, the, 139-40 ; paraphrases 

of, 95 
Purcell, Henry, 16 
Pym, John, 171 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 198, 253 

Ranelagh, Lady, 69 

Ready and Easy Way A, to 
Establish a Free Common- 
weaUh, 65 

Reason, The, of Church Govern- 
ment, 13, 37 

Regicides, the, 55,63, 71, 74 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 16 

Rome, 44, 209 

Rossetti, Daute G., 133, 135 

St. Brides', Fleet Street, 46 

St. Giles' Church, Cripplegate, 79 

St. John, J. A., 252 

St. Paul, 9, 144, 218 

St. Paul's Cathedral, 89, 193 

Salmasius, 59-62, 69, 218 

Samson Agonistes, 13, 20, 24, 78, 

83, 99, 199, 219 et sqq., 250 
Sansovino's Library, Venice, 193 
Saumaise, see Salmasius. 
Scudamore, Lord, 43 



Shakspeare, W., 9, 14, 17, 32, 35, 
36, 80, 85, 90, 103, 114, 118, 145, 
166, 247 ; sonnets, 133-5, 253 

Shelley, P. B., 20, 29, 50, 79, 90, 
99, 102, 111, 125, 228 

Shelley, Mrs. P. B., 50 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 58, 98, 124, 135 

Skinner, CjTiack, 62, 133 

Smithfleld, 72 

Song on May Morning, 36, 107 

Sonnets, 47, 54, 62-3, 68, 69, 91, 
106, 131 et sqq. 

Sophocles, 82, 233, 245 

Spectator, The, 253 

Spenser, Edmund, 93, 97, 98, 
111, 115, 116, 124, 125, 153 

State, The, of Innocetiee, 240, 253 

Statius, 157 

Strafford, Earl of, 171 

Sumner, Rev. C. R., 252 

Syramous, Charles, 252 

Tasso, Torquato, 45, 82, 153. 154 
Tennyson, Alfred, 69, 90, 197 
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates^ 

56, 58, 75 
Theocritus, 124 
Todd, Rev. H. J., 251 
Toland, John, 251 
Tonson, Jacob, 250 
Treatise of Christian Doctrine, 252 
Trinity College Library, 89, 250 
Turner, J. W. M., 16 
Tyburn, 71, 90 
Verrall, A. W., 240 
Virgil, 82, 84, 89, 91, 124, 139, 

150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 163, 175 
Vita Nuova, La ^ 120 

WaUer, Edmund, 104 

Warton, Joseph, 118, 126, 214 

Warton, Thomas, 253 

Whitehall, 58, 70, 74, 219 

Williamson, Dr. G. C., 252 

Winchester, Marchioness of, 36 

Windsor, 37 

Windsor Castle, 40 

Wood, Antliony k, 31, 35, 252 

Wordsworth, W., 26, 34, 79, 90, 
131, 133, 135, 137, 140, 141,206, 
227-30 ; sonnets, 137-41, 253 

Works, The, of John Milton, in 
Prose and Verse, 252 

Wren, Sir Christopher, 16, 89 

Wright, W. Aldis, 251 

Young, Thomas, 27 



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Author of The Republican Tradition in Europe, etc. 

26. The Dawn of History. 

By J. L. Myres, Professor of Ancient History, Oxford. 

30. Rome. 

By W. Warde Fowler, author of Social Life at Rome, etc. "A 
masterly sketch of Roman character and what it did for the 
world." — London Spectator. 

84. The Growth of Europe. 

By Granville Cole, Professor of Geology, Royal College of 
Science, Ireland. A study of the geology and physical geography 
in connection with the political geography. 

13. Medieval Europe. 

By H. W. C. Davis, Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, author 
of Charlemagne, etc. 

33. The History of England. 

By A. F. Pollard, Professor of English History, University of 
London. 



^ 



95. Belgium. 

By R. C. K, Ensor, Sometime Scholar of Balliol College. The 
geographical, linguistic, historical, artistic and literary associations. 

3. The French Revolution. 

By HiLAiRE Belloc 

4. A Short History of War and Peace. 

By G. H. Perris, author of Russia in Revolution, etc. The Hon. 
James Bryce writes: "I have read it with much interest and 
pleasure, admiring the skill with which you have managed to com- 
press so many facts and views into so small a volume." 

^ 20. History of Our Time (1885-1911). 

By G. P. GoocH. A "moving picture" of the world since 1885. 

/ 22. The Papacy and Modern Times. 

By Rev. William Barry, D. D.. author of The Papal Monarchy, 
etc. The story of the rise and fall of the Temporal Power. 

^ 8. Polar Exploration. 

By Dr. W. S. Bruce, Leader of the "Scotia" expedition. Empha- 
sizes the results of the expeditions. 

18. The Opening-up of Africa. 

By Sir H. H. Johnston. The first living authority on the sub- 
ject tells how and why the _ "native races" went to the various 
parts of Africa and summarizes its exploration and colonization. 

^ 19. The Civilization of China 

By H. A. Giles, Professor of Chinese, Cambridge. 

o 36. Peoples and Problems of India. 

By Sir T. W. Holuerness. "The best small treatise dealing with 
the range of subjects fairly indicated by the title." — The Dial. 

^ 7. Modern Geography. 

By Dr. Marion Newbigin. Shows the relation of physical features 
to living things and to some of the chief institutions of civilization. 

X 51. Master Mariners. 

By John R. Spears, author of The History of Our Navy, etc. A 
history of sea craft adventure from the earliest times. 

SOCIAL SCIENCE 
t 91. The Negro. 

By W. E. BuRGHARDT DuBois, author of Soiils of Black Folks, 
etc. A history of the black man in Africa, America or wherever 
else his presence has been or is important. 

= 77. Co-Partnership and Profit Sharing. 

By Aneurin Williams, Chairman, Executive Committee, Inter- 
national Co-operative Alliance, etc. Explains the various types 
of co-vartnership or profit-sharing, or both, and gives details of 
the arrangements now in force in many of the great industries. 

' 98. Political Thought: From Herbert Spencer to 
the Present Day. 

By Ernest Barker, M. A. 



79. Unemployment. 

By A. C. PiGou, M. A., Professor of Political Economy at CarU' 
bridge. The meaning, measurement, distribution, and effects of un- 
employment, its relation to wages, trade fluctuations, and disputes, 
and some proposals of remedy or relief. 

80. Common-Sense in Law. 

By Prof. Paul Vinogradoff, D. C. L., LL. D. Social and Legal 
Rules — Legal Rights and Duties — Facts and Acts in Law — Legislation 
— Custom — ^Judicial Precedents — Equity — The Law of Nature. 

49. Elements of Political Economy. 

By S. J. Chapman, Professor of Political Economy and Dean of 
Faculty of Commerce and Administration, University of Manchester. 
A clear statement of the theory of the subject for non-expert readers. 

11. The Science of Wealth. 

By J. A. HoBSON, author of Problems of Poverty. A study of the 
structure and working of the modern business world. 

1. Parliament. Its History, Constitution, and 
Practice. 

By Sir Courtenay P, Ilbert, Clerk of the House of Commons. 
"Can be praised without reserve. Admirably clear." — New York Sun. 

16. Liberalism. 

By Prof. L. T. Hobhouse, author of Democracy and Reaction. A 
masterly philosophical and historical review of the subject. 

5. The Stock Exchange. 

By F. W. Hirst, Editor of the London Economist. Reveals to the 
non-financial mind the facts about investment, speculation, and the 
other terms which the title suggests. 

10. The Socialist Movement. 

By J. Ramsay Macdonald, Chairman of the British Labor Party. 
"The latest authoritative exposition of Socialism." — San Francisco 
Argonaut. 

28. The Evolution of Industry. 

By D. H. MacGregor, Professor of Political Economy, University 
of Leeds. An outline of the recent changes that have given us the 
present conditions of the working classes and the principles involved- 

29. Elements of English Law. 

By W. M. Geldart, Vinerian Professor of English Law, Oxford. A 
simple statement of the basic principles of the Engl'=-h legal system 
on which that of the United States is based. 

32. The School: An Introduction to the Study of 
Education. 

By J. J. FiNDLAY, Professor of Education, Manchester. Presents 
the history, the psychological basis, and the theory of the school with 
a rare power of summary and suggestion. 

6. Irish Nationality. 

By Mrs. J. R. Green. A brilliant account of the genius and mission 
of the Irish people. "An entrancing work, and I would advise every 
one with a drop of Irish blood in his veins or a vein of Irish sym- 
pathy in his heart to read it." — New York Times' Review. 



NATURAL SCIENCE 

' 68. Disease and Its Causes. 

By W. T. Councilman, M. D., LL. D., Professor of Pathology, Har- 
vard University. 

85. Sex. 

By J. Arthur Thompson and Patrick Geddes, joint authors of The 
Evolution of Sex. 

71. Plant Life. 

By J. B. Farmer, D. Sc, F. R. S., Professor of Botany in the Im- 
perial College of Science. This very fully illustrated volume con- 
tains an account of the salient features of plant form and function- 

63. The Origin and Nature of Life. 

By Bexjamin M, Moore, Professor of Bio-Chemistry, Liverpool. 

90. Chemistry. 

By Raphael Meldola, F. R. S., Professor of Chemistry, Finsbury 
Technical College. Presents the way in which the science has devel- 
oped and the stage it has reached. 

53. Electricity. 

By GiSBERT Kapp, Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of 
Birmingham. 

54. The Making of the Earth. 

By J. W. Gregory, Professor of Geology, Glasgow University. 38 
maps and figures. Describes the origin of the earth, the formation 
and changes of its surface and structure, its geological history, the 
first appearance of life, and its influence upon the globe. 

56. Man: A History of the Human Body. 

By A. Keith, M. D., Hunterian Professor, Royal College of Sur- 
geons. Shows how the human body developed. 

74. Nerves. 

By David Eraser Harris, M. D., Professor of Physiology, Dalhousie 
University, Halifax. Explains in non-technical language the place 
and powers of the nervous system. 

21. An Introduction to Science. 

By Prof. J. Arthur Thomson, Science Editor of the Home Univer- 
sity Library. For those unacquainted with the scientific volumes hi 
the series, this would prove an excellent introduction. 

14. Evolution. 

By Prof. J. Arthur Thomson and Prof. Patrick Geddes. Explains 
to the layman what the title means to the scientific world. 

23. Astronomy. 

By A. R. HiNKS, Chief Assistant at the Cambridge Observatory. 
"Decidedly original in substance, and the most readable and informa- 
tive little book on modern astronomy we have seen for a long time." 

■ — Nature. 

24. Psychical Research. 

By Prof, W. F. Barrett, formerly President of the Socciety for 
Psychical Research. A strictly scientific examination. 



9. The Evolution of li'lants. 

By Dr. D. H. Scott, President of the Linnean Society of London. 
The story of the development of flowering plants, from the earliest 
zoological times, unlocked from technical language. 

43. Matter and Energy. 

By F. SoDDY, Lecturer in Physical Chemistry and Radioactivity, 
University of Glasgow. "Brilliant. Can hardly be surpassed. Sure 
to attract attention." — New York Sun. 

41. Psychology, The Study of Behaviour. 

By William McDougall, of Oxford. A well digested summary of 
the essentials of the science put in excellent literary form by a lead- 
ing authority. 

42. The Principles of Physiology. 

By Prof. J. G. McKendrick. A compact statement by the Emeritus 
Professor at Glasgow, for uninstructed readers. 

37. Anthropology. 

By R. R. Marett, Reader in Social Anthropology, Oxford. Seeks to 
plot out and sum up the general series of changes, bodily and mental, 
undergone by man in the course of history. "Excellent. So enthusi- 
astic, so clear and witty, and so well adapted to the general reader,** 
— American Library Association Booklist. 

17. Crime and Insanity. 

By Dr. C. A. Mercier, author of Text-Book of Insanity, etc 

12. The Animal World. 

By Prof. F. W. Gamble. 

15. Introduction to Mathematics. 

By A. N. Whitehead, author of Universal Algebra. 

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 

69. A History of Freedom of Thought. 

By John B. Bury, M. A., LL. D., Regius Professor of Modern His- 
tory in Cambridge University. Summarizes the history of the long 
struggle between authority and reason and of the emergence of the 
principle that coercion of opinion is a mistake. 

55. Missions : The^'r Rise and Development. 

By Mrs. Mandell Creighton, author of History of England. The 
author seeks to prove that missions have done more to civilize the 
world than any other human agency. 

52. Ethics. 

By G. E. Moore, Lecturer in Moral Science, Cambridge. Discusses 
•what is right and what is wrong, and the whys and wherefores. 

65. The Literature of the Old Testament. 

By George F. Moore, Professor of the History of Religi9n, Harvard 
University. "A popular work of the highest order. Will be profit- 
able to anybody who cares enough about Bible study to read a serious 
book on the subject." — American Journal of Theology, 

50. The Making of the New Testament. 

By B. W. Bacon, Professor of New Testament Criticism, Yale. An 
authoritative summary of the results of modern critical research 
with regard to the origins of the New Testament. 



96. A History of Philosophy. 

By Clement C. J. Webb, Oxford. 

35. The Problems of Philosophy. 

By Bertrand Russell, Lecturer and Late Fellow, Trinity College, 
Cambridge. 

44. Buddhism. 

By Mrs. Rhys Davids, Lecturer on Indian Philosophy, Manchester. 

46. English Sects: A History of Nonconformity. 

By W. B. Selbie, Principal of Manchester College, Oxford. 

60. Comparative Religion. 

By Prof. J. Estlin Carpenter. "One of the few authorities on this 
subject compares all the religions to see what they nave to offer on 
the great themes of religion." — Christian Work and Evangelist. 

88. Religious Development Between Old and New 
Testaments. 

By R. H. Charles, Canon of Westminster. Shows how religious 
and ethical thought between 180 B. C. and 100 A. D. grew naturally 
into that of the New Testament. 

LITERATURE AND ART 

73. Euripides and His Age. 

By Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek, Oxford. 

81. Chaucer and His Times. 

By Grace E. Hadow, Lecturer Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; Late 
Reader, Bryn Mawr. 

70. Ancient Art and Ritual. 

By Jane E. Harrison, LL. D., D. Litt. "One of the 100 most im- 
portant books of 1913." — New York Times Review. 

61. The Victorian Age in Literature. 

By G. K. Chesterton. The most powerfully sustained and brilliant 
piece of writing Mr. Chesterton has yet published. 

97. Milton. 

By John Bailey. 

59. Dr. Johnson and His Circle. 

By John Bailey. Johnson's life, character, works, and friendships 
are surveyed; and there is a notable vindication of the "Genius of 
Boswell." 

58. The Newspaper. 

By G. BiNNEY Dibble. The first full account, from the inside, of 
newspaper organization as it exists to-day. 

62. Painters and Painting. 

By Sir Frederick Wedmore. With 16 half-tone illustrations. 

64. The Literature of Germany. 

By J. G. Robertson. 

48. Great Writers of America. 

Bv W. P. Trent and John Erskine, of Columbia University. 

87. The Renaissance. 

By Edith Sichel, author of Catherine de Medici, Men and Women 
of the French Renaissance. 



93. An Outline of Russian Literature. 

By Maurice Baring, author of The Russian People, etc. Tols- 
toi, Tourgenieff, Dostoieffsky, Pushkin (the father of Russian 
Literature), Saltykov (the satirist), Leskov, and many other authors. 

40. The English Language. 

By L. P. Smith. A concise history of its origin and development. 

45. Medieval English Literature 

By W. P. Ker, Professor of English Literature, University Col- 
lege, London. "One of the soundest scholars. His style is effec- 
tive, simple, yet never dry." — The Athenaeimi. 

89. Elizabethan Literature. 

By J. M. Robertson, M. P., author of Montaigne and Shake- 
speare, Modern Humanists. 

'2n, Modern English Literature. 

By G. H. Mair. From Wyatt and Surrey to Synge and Yeats. 
"One of the best of this great series." — Chicago Evening Post. 

2. Shakespeare. 

By John Masefield. "One of the very few indispensable ad- 
juncts to a Shakespearean Library." — Boston Transcript, 

31. Landmarks in French Literature. 

By G. L. Strachey, Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. "It 
is difficult to imagine how a better account of French Literature 
could be given in 250 pages." — London Times. 

38. Architecture. 

By Prof. W. R. Lethaby. An introduction to the history and 
theory of the art of building. 

66. Writing English Prose. 

By Willia.m T. Brewster, Professor of English, Columbia Univer- 
sity. "Should be put into the hands of every man who is begin- 
ning to write and of every teacher of English that has brains 
enough to understand sense." — New York Sun. 

83. William Morris: His Work and Influence. 

Bv A. Glutton Brock, author of Shelley: The Man and the Poet. 
William Morris believed that the artist should toil for love of his 
work rather than the gain of his employer, and so he turned 
from making works of art to remaking society. 

75. Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle. 

By H. N. Brailsford. The influence of the French Revolution 
on England. 

OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
34 West 33d Street New York 



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